Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Mandel follows her breakout dystopian hit, Station Eleven (2014), with another tale of wanderers whose fates are interconnected, this time by a Ponzi scheme rather than the demise of most of the world's population. Beautiful young bartender Vincent Smith (named for poet Edna St. Vincent Millay) has no illusions about the relationship she enters into with Jonathan Alkaitis, an uber-wealthy investor more than twice her age. Vincent leaves her job at the remote Hotel Caiette to move into Jonathan's mansion in Connecticut and pretend to be his wife, attending dinners with his investors. Mandel reveals early on that Jonathan's business dealings aren't above board, but even with this information front and center, she still manages to build nail-biting tension as things start to go wrong for Jonathan and his associates. Mandel weaves an intricate spider web of a story, connecting the people whom Jonathan and Vincent's lives touch and irrevocably change, from Vincent's feckless brother to the small group of colleagues abetting Jonathan's scheme to the people whose fortunes are decimated by Jonathan's machinations. A gorgeously rendered tragedy.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The phenomenal success of Station Eleven has set high expectations for Mandel's new novel, and both books been optioned for television series.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2020 Booklist

Library Journal
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This latest novel from the author of the hugely successful Station Eleven forgoes a postapocalyptic vision for something far scarier—the bottomless insecurity of contemporary life. One of Mandel's main characters, a twentysomething young woman from British Columbia with the unusual name of Vincent, is orphaned and unmoored. Through a bartending job at a remote destination hotel off Vancouver Island, she meets and takes up with Jonathan Alkaitis, a Bernie Madoff-like character who owns the hotel. Posing as his wife in New York, Vincent has few illusions about the world of money in which she finds herself. When Alkaitis's Ponzi scheme collapses, she walks away initially unscathed and signs on as a cook on a container ship. And that's only one thread in the plot; numerous characters slip in and out of this affluent world, wrestling with financial loss, drug addiction, or sibling guilt. We even find a couple of characters from Station Eleven, alive and well and in the shipping business. VERDICT Highly recommended; with superb writing and an intricately connected plot that ticks along like clockwork, Mandel offers an unnerving critique of the twinned modern plagues of income inequality and cynical opportunism. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/19.]—Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Publishers Weekly
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Mandel’s wonderful novel (after Station Eleven) follows a brother and sister as they navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt. Settings include British Columbia’s coastal wilderness, New York City’s fashionable neighborhoods and corporate headquarters, a container ship in international waters, and a South Carolina prison. In 1994, 18-year-old drug-using dropout Paul Smith visits his 13-year-old half-sister, Vincent, in Vancouver. Vincent has just lost her mother and acquired her first video camera. Five years later, in the wilderness north of Vancouver, Vincent tends bar at a luxury hotel where Paul works as the night houseman. Paul leaves after writing on a window in acid marker a message even he doesn’t understand. Vincent relocates to the East Coast and what Mandel calls the kingdom of money to play trophy wife for investor Jonathan Alkaitis. When Jonathan’s Ponzi scheme collapses, he goes to prison, where his victims’ ghosts visit him. Finished with Jonathan and the affluent lifestyle and ignored by her best friend, Vincent takes a job as assistant cook on a container ship. Paul, meanwhile, has set Vincent’s old videos to music. The videos have helped Paul, despite a lifelong drug problem, tap into his creative gifts. Using flashbacks, flash-forwards, alternating points-of-view, and alternate realities, Mandel shows the siblings moving in and out of each other’s lives, different worlds, and versions of themselves, sometimes closer, sometimes further apart, like a double helix, never quite linking. This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness. 200,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown, Ltd. (Mar.)

Library Journal
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Guests at the Hotel Caiette can afford a special reality. They pay top dollar to be "wilderness adjacent"—nestled in the beauty of nature while shielded from its discomforts. Within the "glass and cedar palace" in remote British Columbia, a well-heeled shipping executive avidly describes his work, and the beautiful bartender charms a wealthy guest. Years after those fateful meetings, the woman mysteriously disappears from a container ship in mid-voyage and the former executive has lost his home and savings in a Ponzi scheme. All these events prove inextricably connected, with life-destroying consequences rippling outward as unceasingly as freighter ships traversing their routes. Mandel (Station Eleven) depicts a haunting world in which reality is a bit permeable and events always in flux. Characters inhabit a wide range of states and shades of existence—poverty, sleeplessness, a work shift, incarceration, a fairy tale, beauty, money, privilege, loss of money and privilege—at times seeking the refuge of an alternate reality, the "counter life." With an ideal voice to convey the slightly surreal atmosphere and showcase Mandel's arresting prose, narrator Dylan Moore keeps readers immersed amid shifting time and intersecting vignettes. VERDICT Station Eleven fans and literary fiction listeners will be captivated. Enthusiastically recommended.—Linda Sappenfield, Round Rock P.L., TX

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery; Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds; Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company; and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in "the kingdom of money." Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into "the counterlife," a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure.A strange, subtle, and haunting novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal
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At the upscale glass-and-cedar Hotel Caiette, on an island in British Columbia, bartender Vincent becomes involved with hotel owner Jonathan Alkaitis even as Vincent's half-brother leaves a note on a window advising, "Why don't you swallow broken glass." The message shatters an executive for the shipping company Neptune-Avramidis. Years later, Vincent vanishes from a Neptune-Avramidis cargo ship even as a Ponzi scheme sends several fortunes to the bottom of the ocean. Mandel's next bright puzzler after Station Eleven, a National Book Award finalist and Arthur C. Clarke Award winner.