Review of Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025

Sara Hussein, a woman in her 30s, is a museum archivist. She lives with her husband, Elias, and two toddlers, in Los Angeles. One weekend before Christmas, Sara gets stopped at an airport by the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA). An arm of the government, the RAA’s mission is to prevent future crimes by identifying people who, based on their dreams, they believe, are at risk of harming others. 

The RAA has access to Sara’s dreams because she agreed to have a neuroprosthetic called Dreamsaver implanted in her skull many years ago, to help her get over her insomnia. The device delivered on its promise: Sara began sleeping like a baby. What she did not realise is that she had agreed to a clause in the terms and conditions that allowed the company, Dreamsaver Inc., to track her dreams. The RAA, which has access to all her data, including a dream where she thinks of poisoning Elias, whisks her off to a bleak retention centre called Madison. Here, she finds, residents are called retainees or, ironically, programme participants.

Crime is relative

The idea is striking, especially since it doesn’t seem entirely implausible. We already live in an age of surveillance capitalism, where personal data is stacked up and sold for profit, to predict human behaviour. The nature of privacy is also changing. To imagine that parts of even our subconscious mind — where our most private, unregulated thoughts and impulses reside — could be cherry-picked and sold for analysis is a terrifying proposition. 

A Kafkaesque bureaucracy makes Sara’s experience worse. At Madison, every small perceived infraction — “loitering”, “unauthorised hairstyle”, and “attempt to access unauthorised reading material” — ends up in an extension of her stay. Sara also has a rebellious streak, which results in her “risk score”, reminiscent of China’s social credit system, going up. As Sara realises to her horror, “that they [the detainees] have committed no crime is besides the point. In any case, crime is relative, its boundaries shifting in service of the people in power… A crime isn’t the same as a moral transgression.” Her frustration and anger build up slowly. 

Author Laila Lalami
| Photo Credit:
Instagram.com

Unfortunately, this is where the novel loses momentum. Lalami introduces a host of characters at the centre, both “retainees” and guards, and most of them do little to propel the narrative. We travel through the story solely with Sara’s perspective, even when the guard Hinton’s story or the retainee Eisley’s story seem more intriguing. And when there is an interesting twist, which immediately reminded me a little of Squid Games, Lalami wraps up that portion hastily.   

Tech vs. privacy

The author’s exploration of how bureaucracy and algorithms work is sharp and chilling simply because it is so real. Being detained at airports, especially in the United States, can be traumatic, and all the more so if it involves racial profiling. As Sara realises finally, she has been at Madison for “nothing more than a minor squabble at the airport in London, a poorly phrased statement, a few dreams, a connection to something that happened thirty years ago”. 

Across the world, people are arbitrarily accused of something, and spend years in prison without trial. There are more devices and apps being introduced everywhere, and we have little idea of how much of our privacy we are foregoing when we use them. As Lalami writes, what makes this frightening is that “the data doesn’t lie. It doesn’t tell the truth either”. The entire experience also makes Sara question herself: is she, someone who “couldn’t possibly be considered a member of the lawbreaking classes”, capable of committing a crime after all? 

The social commentary might be clear, but The Dream Hotel quickly turns disappointing as a novel. For the most part, it just plods along with a long, uneventful dream-like quality. Most of the drama is strangely reserved for the end. With fewer internal monologues, tighter editing, and greater exploration of other characters, this novel could have lived up to its immense potential. 

radhika.s@thehindu.co.in 

The Dream Hotel

Laila Lalami

Bloomsbury 

499

Published – December 16, 2025 06:05 am IST