The Glass Hotel: A novel

she applied bright lipstick and tied a silk scarf over her hair for added fortitude.

None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.

of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity.

Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from New

She didn’t tell him that her mother had died two weeks earlier, or that her brother had been lurking around and saw her do it, or that she had a brother. It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.

“Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I’m not naming names, and he said, ‘I just can’t believe what’s happening to our industry, can you?’ And I’m trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let’s break this down. What is it you can’t believe, exactly? Tha

watching the first pale flowers push through dark earth in the springtime,

There’s such happiness in a successful escape.

A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment.