Morocco - The Dream Hotel - Laila Lalami

21st Aug 2025:

Random googling of a country and "science fiction author"

Found this:

The Dream Hotel

Novel by Laila Lalami

Looks good will order when I'm back from holiday

5th Sept 2025:

Ordered the book

7th Sept 2025

Book arrived

30th October 2025

Started the audio book

6th November 2025

Finished the audio book.

I usually read the physical novels for this project, and did buy the physical book, partly because I read slower and take more in, with a physical book. I've also never quite got on with ebooks and ereaders. But I had a spare credit on audible and thought this would be fun to try.

The Physical Book:

It's

The Story:

I'm not sure about this book. I kind of liked it. There was a very close personal feel to it. It really micro focused on one female character who gets detained, to determine her risk of committing a crime, that the system has predicted she will commit. Her 21 day detention turns in to a year long saga of extensions to her detention, conspiracies and sinister realisations.

Minority report (the film, never read the book it's based on) did the same but with far more action and fuxkwit prick as lead actor, but I'll not descend into full anti Cruise mode just yet. There are references in the book to Metamorphosis by Kafka. This is a book I've read and I rather like the Kafka book along with The Trail, by the same author. They are both about the absurdatities of burocracy and that once your in 'the system' you're on an endless pointless treadmill until you die.

This book did play on those ideas of being totally helpless and at the whim of pendants and policymakers. 

The sci-fi element was slightly more interesting with developments in recording dreams and the ability to place subliminal adverts into dreams, completely covertly.

Overview:

Yeah a nice story, that was needlessly long with not much happening, that just kind of ended with out any real resolution or message of either hope or one of an eternally hopelessness life. And if the author had picked one of those it would have been great, but the ended was just a little: 'oh ok...'

So I probably wouldn't recommend, and I'm glad I did this via listening, whilst at work, rather than investing the time in a physical book..