Yes, I think that generally speaking a capacity for reinvention is wonderful. It seems that for some characters it’s a strength, but for others a way to avoid reality and their own demons. Reinvention and transformation are strong themes.

The truth is that I’d always wanted to write a ghost story. It’s funny – I set out to write a book that was quite narrowly focused on the collapse and aftermath of a massive Ponzi scheme but by the end I’d written a ghost story wherein a Ponzi scheme was just one element. Would you describe it as a ghost story?Ībsolutely. Ghostliness and hauntings permeate the novel. I'd always wanted to write a ghost story. But at different levels of money, they’re no longer on the same plane. You see it most vividly at the airport: there are first-class lounges, and a first-class section on the plane. I think if you live with an enormous amount of money, that puts you in a very different world, with its own customs and mores. It was partly a desire to write about money as its own country. The life of Jonathan’s fake trophy wife inside “the kingdom of money” is vacuous and unfulfilling. There’s something fascinating in that to me. But to be able to split your life in that way: to devote your professional energies to running a massive fraud and at the same time be a husband and a friend and a father. We all compartmentalise to some extent: you’re a different person at work than you are at home, a different person with your family than with acquaintances.

What is it about that personality type that interested you? It’s not Madoff’s story but your protagonist, Jonathan Alkaitis, is a very similar character. And here was this fabulously wealthy conman who’d been gambling with retirement savings. There was such popular rage directed against him because we thought our economies were solid and it turned out to be something of a house of cards.

Madoff almost seemed like the embodiment of that era.

The Glass Hotel is not about Bernie Madoff or his staff, his family or his investors. In particular, I was fascinated by the Bernie Madoff story. It’s a period in recent history that I remember so vividly. Why was that a period you wanted to explore? The Glass Hotel centres on the 2008 financial crash. It was a bestseller in both the UK and the US, winning the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, and nominations for the National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner award. Her fourth novel, the dystopian fiction of Station Eleven, propelled her to fame in 2014. Emily St John Mandel is a Canadian novelist now residing in New York.

The glass hotel emily st john mandel