Lalami, Laila
Entry updated 24 February 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1968- ) Moroccan author, mostly in UK and US from 1990, active from the mid-1980s; she has written in English since 1996. Her first four novels, beginning with Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), have been nonfantastic; she is of sf interest for her fifth novel, The Dream Hotel (2025), set in a Near Future Dystopian California, where the protagonist of the tale is detained in a privatized "retention centre" (ie a Prison) for having registered on surveillance software as being likely to commit a specific crime: which is to murder her husband. The techniques used to establish her "risk score" include a Dream Hacking Technology which exposes her personhood to observers. Her stay in the centre becomes increasingly Kafka-esque as her release is repeatedly delayed through opaque redefinitions of the terms of her incarceration, terms not revealed to her and which, therefore, she constantly "violates" (see Crime and Punishment). The only sense to make of this is that she is being retained until she has been thoroughly harvested: bankrupt, bereft, totally expropriated. Lalami's rendering of this nightmare is quietly verisimilitudinous. [JC]
Laila Lalami
born Rabat, Morocco: 1968
works (highly selected)
- The Dream Hotel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2025) [hb/]
links
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