Join us for the OE Book Club. Wine and Lite Bites are included in the ticket.
About this EventOE Book ClubHeld in person at Oxford Exchange on the second Tuesday of every month. This book club focuses on literary novels that stand the test of time and inspire thoughtful discussion.
Books are available in-person at the Oxford Exchange bookstore, or purchase through our online shop.
Dream Hotel | Laila Lalami
From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed,
The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
Book Club Titles
- January The Overstory by
- February All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
- March One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez
- April Atonement by Ian McEwan
- May Dream House Laila Lalami
- June The Frieny by Sigrid Nunez
- July Jaws by Peter Benchley
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