She’s just arrived in Nice with her boyfriend, the financier Jonathan Alkaitis, whom she met on the lip of the wilderness, at a five-star hotel (the splendid glass edifice of the title) where she was working as a bartender. When Vincent, the woman in “The Glass Hotel,” marvels at the implausibility of her life, she is standing on a terrace, gazing out at the “otherworldly blue” of the Mediterranean. She is our bard of waking up in the wrong time line. She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet, where everyday people pause to wonder how, exactly, it came to this. (Her previous novel, “ Station Eleven,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2014, follows the survivors of a flu that wipes out ninety-nine per cent of humanity.) Mandel’s gift is to weave realism out of extremity. It is possible, then, to tear through Mandel’s fiction in a delirium of recognition. The coronavirus may have heightened our sense of living in an “extraordinary” moment, but current events-climate change, the President-have been stoking it for some time.

I read these words in self-quarantine, while watching my boyfriend remove five varieties of pasta from a grocery bag. “She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life,” Mandel writes. John Mandel, a woman named Vincent takes stock of her existence. Not quite halfway through “ The Glass Hotel,” a new novel by Emily St. John Mandel underscores the seemingly infinite paths a person might travel.

The glass hotel emily st john