Longlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is a chilling dissection of surveillance culture, technological overreach and the quiet, everyday ways people become complicit in their own monitoring.

Set in a near-future America shaped by predictive surveillance, Lalami tells the story of a woman swept into a surreal dystopia where dreams are weaponised by the state. Accused of a crime she hasn’t committed – yet – and detained indefinitely in a retention centre in the Californian desert, she must navigate a world in which corporations trade in the contents of our subconscious and algorithms claim the authority to determine guilt, innocence and destiny.

Lalami joins host Sonia Nair to explore the seductive pull of technology, the commodification of the private self and the unnervingly plausible future where a single line of code could seal a person’s fate. 

This event was recorded on Wednesday March 4th 2026 at The Wheeler Centre.

The official bookseller was The Chestnut Tree Bookshop.

Featured music is ‘Different Days’ by Chill Cole.