NATIONAL BESTSELLER ● READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

ライラ・ララミは本作で、管理社会の最果てとして「夢」が蹂躙される恐怖を、研ぎ澄まされた筆致で抉り出します。アルゴリズムが内面を断罪する不条理さは、現代のテクノロジーへの盲信を鋭く告発し、読者の魂に「自由の本質」を激しく問いかけます。 映像版では監視の冷徹な美学が際立ちますが、原作には文字でしか辿り着けない「思考の迷宮」があります。映像が夢を具現化する一方、テキストは解析不能な情動の震えを掬い取ります。両メディアを往復することで、私たちが利便性と引き換えに失ったものの正体を、より重層的に痛感できるはずです。