‘The Glass Hotel,’ by Emily St. John Mandel: An Excerpt

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. 1 Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain— 2 Sweep me up. Words scrawled on a window when I was thirteen years old. I stepped back and let the marker drop from my hand and still I remember the exuberance of that moment, that feeling in my chest like light glinting on crushed glass— 3 Have I risen to the surface?

The cold is annihilating, the cold is all there is— 4 A strange memory: standing by the shore at Caiette when I was thirteen years old, my brand-new video camera cool and strange in my hands, filming the waves in five-minute intervals, and as I’m filming I hear my own voice whispering, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home,” although where is home if not there? [ Return to the review of “The Glass Hotel. ” ] 5 Where am I? Neither in nor out of the ocean, I can’t feel the cold anymore or actually anything, I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on, and it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next— 6 “Welcome aboard,” the third mate said the first time I ever boarded the Neptune Cumberland.

When I looked at him something struck me, and I thought, You— 7 I am out of time— 8 I want to see my brother. I can hear him talking to me, and my memories of him are agitating. I concentrate very hard and abruptly I’m standing on a narrow street, in the dark, in the rain, in a foreign city. A man is slumped in a doorway just across from me, and I haven’t seen my brother in a decade but I know that it’s him.

Paul looks up and there’s time to notice that he looks terrible, gaunt and undone, he sees me but then the street blinks out— [ Return to the review of “The Glass Hotel.