Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is the latest pick for Jenna Bush Hager’s Today show book club.
Lalami’s novel, set for publication next Tuesday by Pantheon, follows Sara, a woman detained by authorities who’ve been tracking her dreams and believe she will commit a crime in the future. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “an engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.”
Hager announced the novel’s selection on the Today show, saying, “I love this book so much.…Picture a world where the government does not just watch your every move, it monitors your dreams.…I started this book [and] I read it in a weekend. I could not put it down. It is really relevant; it’s a meditation on free will, sisterhood, the power of love, and the power of hope.”
Lalami told Today.com that the idea for the novel came from an unexpected Google notification on her phone, which had figured out that she regularly attended a yoga class twice a week. She had never added the class to her Google calendar.
“One of the things that happened for me during the writing of the book is that it gave me hope,” she said. “It made me think that we, all of us, actually have the tools to fight back against surveillance. Maybe it can be something small, it can be something large, but we all have the power to fight back against this technological surveillance. We are not powerless.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
