The Dream Hotel

Sara Hussein is a Moroccan-American museum archivist flying home to Los Angeles when airport officials stop her. An algorithm has scored her as likely to commit a crime in the future, and nothing she has actually done figures in the decision.

Part of that score comes from a brain implant she uses to sleep better, which also collects the content of her dreams. She is sent to a retention center run by a private company and told the stay will be short and precautionary. Ten months on, she is still inside. She follows every rule and still cannot get a hearing scheduled.

Then a new detainee arrives and upsets the order the facility depends on. Sara is pushed toward a confrontation with the corporations that hold her.

This is literary dystopian fiction, close to the present in feel, about surveillance and predictive policing. The tone is cold and controlled rather than loud. The injustice runs through paperwork, procedure and patient waiting, and the question the book keeps returning to is what remains private once dreams can be used as evidence.