In her celebrated novels, Laila Lalami has drawn inspiration from history and immigrant culture. The Moor’s Account (2014), longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a North African slave on a journey from Spain to the New World. The Other Americans (2019) describes the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant and restaurateur in California. In The Dream Hotel, Lalami portrays a much starker world. The characters wear white uniforms, sleep at regimented times and eat prison food. 

The Dream Hotel is set in the near future, when the United States has become a surveillance state. Data is collected and fed into a ‘crime-prediction algorithm’. Citizens deemed likely to commit crimes are ‘retained’ under the principle of ‘precaution, not punishment’. Of the hundreds of data sources used, the most fantastic is a dream log compiled using a neuroprosthetic implant called the Dreamsaver, originally designed to help people suffering from insomnia. The titular ‘dream hotel’ is the retention centre for people whose dreams have identified them as societal risks. Sara, the protagonist, was originally imprisoned after dreaming of harming her husband. She remains in the facility ten months after the end of her initial twenty-one-day term due to noncompliant behaviour, which has increased her ‘risk score’. To regain her freedom, she must do the seemingly impossible: behave and dream perfectly.

It’s not an uninteresting idea, so it’s frustrating that Lalami gets distracted from it. Sara is a historian of postcolonial Africa, and old concerns repeatedly intrude at the cost of new ones. Throughout, her academic expertise proves a little too relevant. Glimpsing an inmate tracker, she is reminded of colonial