The Dream Hotel
Sara Hussein, a Moroccan-American museum archivist, is stopped at the airport on her way home to Los Angeles and informed that an algorithm has flagged her as likely to commit a future crime. Her 'risk score'—calculated in part from data harvested by a brain implant meant to help her sleep, which also mines her dreams—lands her in a retention center run by a private company, for what she's told will be a brief, precautionary stay. Ten months later, she is still there, still obeying the rules, still unable to schedule the hearing that might set her free.
When a new detainee arrives and disrupts the facility's careful order, Sara is set on a collision course with the corporations that have taken her freedom. Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel is a chillingly plausible work of literary dystopian fiction about surveillance, predictive policing, and the quiet machinery of injustice—a novel that asks how much of ourselves we surrender when even our dreams are evidence.
A Moroccan-American museum archivist detained by the Risk Assessment Administration after a predictive algorithm, drawing on data from her sleep-aid brain implant, flags her as a future risk to her husband.
A facility attendant at the Madison retention center who enforces its shifting rules on the detainees.
Sara's husband, who remains on the outside during her detention.
A former firefighter detained at Madison and Sara's roommate there.
A fellow detainee at Madison, a guitarist focused on self-preservation.
The Dream Hotel was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025, shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best Novel (2026), and nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It was also selected as a TODAY Show "Read with Jenna" book club pick and became a national bestseller.
The novel is speculative fiction, but author Laila Lalami has said in interviews and in a note at the end of the book that predictive-policing technology is no longer entirely fictional, drawing on real developments in algorithmic risk assessment and data surveillance to make the premise feel plausible rather than far-fetched.
