Moroccan novelist Laila Lalami is set to publish a new book. Titled The Dream Hotel, the novel, Lalami’s fifth, is set in the near future and follows “a museum archivist who gets detained after a predictive algorithm uses her dreams to determine she will commit a crime.”

According to Publishers Weekly, Lisa Lucas at Pantheon bought the North American rights to the book from Lalami’s agent Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group in a six-figure deal, already listed among the most expensive book deals for the month of February 2022. The novel will be edited by Naomi Gibbs, executive editor at Pantheon.

Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, The Moors Account, and The Other Americans. Her honors include a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, an Orange, and Booker Prize longlist, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Aspen Words Literary Prize and National Book Award. She was awarded the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times, Lalami is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

Congratulations to Laila Lalami. We can’t wait to read the new novel!

Stay tuned for more details. Lalami is on Instagram, if you’d like to keep up on news about her events and other updates. Follow her here.