![]() ![]() She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet, where everyday people pause to wonder how, exactly, it came to this. (Her previous novel, “ Station Eleven,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2014, follows the survivors of a flu that wipes out ninety-nine per cent of humanity.) Mandel’s gift is to weave realism out of extremity. ![]() It is possible, then, to tear through Mandel’s fiction in a delirium of recognition. The coronavirus may have heightened our sense of living in an “extraordinary” moment, but current events-climate change, the President-have been stoking it for some time. I read these words in self-quarantine, while watching my boyfriend remove five varieties of pasta from a grocery bag. “She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life,” Mandel writes. John Mandel, a woman named Vincent takes stock of her existence. Not quite halfway through “ The Glass Hotel,” a new novel by Emily St. John Mandel underscores the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel. ![]()
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