Laila Lalami discusses ‘The Dream Hotel’ on our Best March Books episode.

On this episode of Fully Booked, we’re highlighting some of the most anticipated titles of March 2025. First, in a special editors’ segment, Laurie Muchnick, John McMurtrie, Mahnaz Dar, and Laura Simeon join us to discuss their top picks in books for the month. Then, I’m joined by Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami to talk about The Dream Hotel (Pantheon, March 4), “an engrossing and troubling dystopian tale” set in the not-too-distant future, in a nation where dreams are surveilled (starred review).

Lalami is the author of five books, including Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; it was also longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her nationally bestselling novel The Other Americans won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her books have been translated into 20 languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Here’s a bit more from our review of The Dream Hotel: “Lalami’s stellar fifth novel concerns Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American woman who’s returning home from a conference in London to her family in L.A. when she’s held by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that uses biometric data to assess citizens’ ‘pre-crime’ tendencies. She’s done nothing troubling, but her ‘risk score’ is high enough to force a stay at an all-woman ‘retention center’ that’s effectively a prison.…There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here…[but] Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined…[and] the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought. It’s a fiction-workshop cliche that dreams are unnecessary, but here they play a crucial role in the plot, opening up questions of what we’re sacrificing in the name of convenience and safety. The novel’s striking message is summarized in Sara’s retort to a bureaucrat who tells her the data doesn’t lie: ‘It doesn’t tell the truth, either.’”

In our conversation, Lalami describes The Dream Hotel as a woman’s journey through the gauntlet of consequences one might face living under techno-authoritarianism. We talk about how she started the novel in 2014 but set it aside, and what—if any—material survived the intervening decade. She describes the novelist’s impulse to pursue a seemingly far-fetched idea by asking a series of questions about how it could come to be (e.g., the surveillance of dreams: How would it be accomplished? What would the information be used for? How might it be misused? By whom?). We chat about compulsive optimization, the role of dreams in the novel, and how dreaming is something we humans have in common. We bemoan the fact that unmediated human interactions are becoming rarer and touch on linguistics, laughter as resistance, semicolons, and survival as a community effort.

BEST BOOKS OF MARCH 2025:

The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)

Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis (Riverhead)

Stalactite and Stalagmite: A Big Tale From a Little Cave by Drew Beckmeyer (Atheneum)

A Catalog of Burnt Objects by Shana Youngdahl (Dial Books)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

What Did You Do at School Today? by C.C. Lacavera

Why Is My Bra Still On? by Kristen Wasyliszyn

The Student Resistance Handbook by Cevin Soling

Year One by Marina Raydun

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.