Tuesday, December 9, 2025

Pasadena Announces Its 2026 One City, One Story Selection, The Dream Hotel

STAFF REPORT

L: Laila Lalami Photo: © Beowulf Sheehan; R: The Dream Hotel book cover

Pasadena Public Library is proud to announce its book selection for Pasadena’s 2026 One City, One Story community reading celebration: The Dream Hotel by author Laila Lalami. A 19-member selection committee led by Senior Librarian Christine Reeder and made up of community volunteers worked for many months to determine this year’s One City One Story honoree.

Now in its 24th year, One City, One Story is designed to broaden and deepen an appreciation of reading and literature and to promote tolerance and understanding of differing points of view by recommending a compelling book that engages the community in conversation.

The Dream Hotel is a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. In this dystopian novel Sara is detained by agents from the Risk Assessment Administration who have determined she will soon commit a crime using data from her dreams and an algorithm. At the retention center, her detainment is continually extended with every deviation from the ever-shifting rules of the facility and release seems further and furth from possible. Until 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 questions of freedom, technological advances, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; was on the longlist for the Booker Prize; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Lalami’s writing appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

One City, One Story community programs will be held throughout the month of March, highlighted by a conversation with the author on Saturday, March 21, 2026, at 2 p.m. at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd.

For more information on One City, One Story, visit CityOfPasadena.Libguides.com/OneCityOneStory.

Stay connected to the City of Pasadena! Visit us online at CityOfPasadena.net; follow us on X(Twitter) at @PasadenaGov, and Instagram and Facebook at @CityOfPasadena; or call the City Service Center Monday through Friday during business hours at (626) 744-7311.