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Podcast: The Wheeler Centre
Episode: Laila Lalami: The Dream Hotel
Description: 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 subconscio...