The Dream Hotel
2025 novel by Laila Lalami
The Dream Hotel is a 2025 literary science fiction novel by Laila Lalami. It received positive reception from critics.
Plot
Sara Hussein is a Moroccan American woman who, upon her return from a trip to the United Kingdom, is detained by a government agency tasked with determining citizens' propensity to committing crimes. She is detained in what starts as a temporary arrangement but, through bureaucratic hiccups and intentional mismanagement, begins to seem more and more permanent.
Development history
Publication history
The Dream Hotel was published in the United States on March 4, 2025, by Pantheon Books. It was published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing.
Reception
The book received mostly positive reviews from critics. Kirkus Reviews was positive, drawing comparisons to Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described the book as "chillingly original" and "all too plausible." Francine Prose wrote a positive review for The Washington Post, praising the novel's plot and relevance to modern politics. Vulture was also positive, drawing specific attention to the book's symbolism but mildly criticizing the abruptness of the ending.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Dream Hotel” is 2025 novel by Laila Lalami. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dream, Hotel and novel, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “2025 novel by Laila Lalami” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133161438. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow The Dream Hotel primary sources, The Dream Hotel archive and Dream research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Dream Hotel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.