The Glass Hotel Study Guide

Emily St. John Mandel was born in 1979 in Merville, British Columbia, Canada. Her father was a plumber, and her mother was a social worker. When Mandel was 10 years old, she and her family moved to Denman Island, located off the west coast of British Columbia. There, she was homeschooled until she was 15 years old. At 18 years old, Mandel moved to Toronto to study contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She lived in Montreal briefly before relocating to New York City, where she now lives with her husband, playwright and producer Kevin Mandel, and their daughter. Mandel’s fourth novel, Station Eleven (2014), was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her first three novels, Last Night in Montreal (2009), The Singer’s Gun (2010), and The Lola Quartet (2012), were selected as Indie Next Picks, and The Singer’s Gun won the 2014 Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. The Glass Hotel is Mandel’s fifth novel and was published in 2020. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction in 2021.

The securities fraud engineered by Jonathan Alkaitis in The Glass Hotel is inspired loosely by the real-life Madoff investment scandal, the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, that defrauded investors out of tens of billions of dollars. Bernie Madoff was the former chairman of the NASDAQ and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, founded in 1960, for which he served as chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008. Though Madoff testified in court that the Ponzi scheme began in 1991, it’s possible that illegal activates began as early as the 1970s. Despite claims that the firm’s large, stable returns were the result of an investing strategy called “split-strike conversion,” Madoff (like Jonathan Alkaitis in The Glass Hotel) would use client investments to pay out existing clients who wanted to pull out of the fund. Madoff was unable to continue this process when the market dipped in late 2008. He confessed to his sons who, though they worked for him at the firm, were supposedly unaware of the scheme. Madoff’s sons reported him to the authorities the following day, and he pled guilty to securities fraud and money laundering, among other felonies, in 2009. Madoff was forced to forfeit $170 billion and sentenced to 150 years in prison.  He died in prison on April 14, 2021. 

The Glass Hotel is Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel. Prior to the publication of The Glass Hotel, Mandel published four other successful novels: Last Night in Montreal (2009), a novel centered around the criminal investigation of an abduction; The Singer’s Gun (2010), which, like The Glass Hotel, explores themes of corruption and accountability; The Lola Quartet (2012), a literary noir novel about a disgraced journalist in search of his ex-girlfriend and the supposed child they had together; and Station Eleven (2014). Station Eleven is perhaps the best known of these earlier works and centers around a fictional swine flu pandemic, the “Georgia Flu,” that eviscerates the global population. Two characters from The Glass Hotel, Leon Prevant and Miranda, appear first in Station Eleven. The Ponzi scheme at the center of The Glass Hotel is based on the real-life Madoff investment scandal, the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and one that defrauded investors of tens of billions of dollars for over three decades. Two works of nonfiction detailing this historical event include No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (2010) by whistleblower Harry Markopolos, a former securities industry executive and financial fraud investigator who, from 1999 to 2008, gathered evidence of Madoff’s fraud that was repeatedly ignored by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and The Wizard of Lies (2011) by Diana Henriques, an American financial journalist and author based in New York City.