Daisy Hildyard in The Guardian:
The Dream Hotel is Laila Lalami’s fifth novel – earlier works received nominations for the Booker, Pulitzer and National book awards – and has been longlisted for the Women’s prize. Her 2020 nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens, draws on her experiences as a Moroccan American to think about her adopted country’s two-tier system: how rights and freedoms are, in practice, exercised very differently across race, class, gender and national origin. Lalami’s fiction has explored the way these differences play out across a range of times and places: from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), on migrant experiences in modern Morocco, to The Moor’s Account (2014), inspired by the true story of a 16th-century Black man who survived a notorious Spanish colonial expedition to the Americas. Her most recent novel, 2019’s The Other Americans, is set in California in the shadow of the Iraq war, and follows the causes and repercussions of the moment when Driss, a Moroccan immigrant, is killed at an intersection by a speeding car.
In The Dream Hotel, Lalami turns to the future. The novel is especially interesting as a vision of how AI could weave itself into the two-tier system that she has described and reimagined in earlier works.
More here.
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