Grand Scheme

We pick up the story of Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel near the end. The year is 2018, and Vincent, a woman who lives a nomadic life on a shipping freighter, has gone overboard, “plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness.” She will form the central thread through this wandering narrative that wears its flightiness on its sleeve.

Jump back to 1999. Paul, Vincent’s half-brother, runs off to Vancouver after accidentally killing someone by giving him bad ecstasy.

Step forward six years. At a luxury Vancouver Island hotel owned by the wealthy investor Jonathan Alkaitis, Vincent works as a bartender, Paul as a janitor. But we’re there with Walter, the manager. “This place was the opposite of Toronto,” Walter thinks. “And wasn’t that what he’d wanted?”

These are the first three chapters. They leap, as the whole novel does, across time and place and between multiple voices and character perspectives. The narrative...