With “The Glass Hotel,” Emily St. John Mandel offers another beautiful story of connection and loss.

Like “Station Eleven,” this book introduces us to several separate narratives, gradually revealing the weave binding them together. The novel opens with an impressionistic sequence of a woman tumbling into the ocean before pausing with more substantial sections: a young man with a drug problem, a remote hotel, a trophy marriage.

Gradually, we realize, we’re being introduced to a crime of some kind, a fraud stemming from “the kingdom of money” that ruins many lives and, belatedly, places most of its conspirators in jail. But Mandel is really more interested in community, or the lack thereof, as revealed most starkly by the oblivious rich and the “shadow country” of desperate people living on the margins after the 2008 financial crash. 

The author does an excellent job crafting her cast, making them memorable and rich in characterization. Most of the principals are aware of being on the outside, walled off by addiction, wealth, poverty, crime, prison, age and art. They chronicle these shortcomings, but they don’t wallow in them, and the result is absorbingly human.

I did feel the book cheated a little by deploying ghosts into the narrative, tangible beings that facilitate some connections and resolutions that couldn’t have happened otherwise. But I was moved by the outcomes, finding the novel a rewarding experience.