Hay Festival 2025 – Laila Lalami in conversation with Marcela Fuentes
Laila Lalami’s new book The Dream Hotel included with the ticket!
What does it mean to start over —across borders, across identities, across versions of the self?
Novelist and essayist Laila Lalami joins us to discuss The Dream Hotel, her latest novel and a recent selection for the Read with Jenna book club. Set between Morocco and Los Angeles, the novel follows a man who awakens from a coma with fragmented memories and a new ability to inhabit others’ dreams. Lalami uses this surreal premise to explore trauma, dislocation, and the uneasy relationship between past and present.
Author of Conditional Citizens, a memoir about the limits of American belonging, and The Moor’s Account, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lalami’s work consistently probes the intersections of identity, migration, and national myth. She is also a prominent public thinker, contributing essays to The New York Times, The Nation, and The Washington Post.
In this conversation, Lalami will reflect on the imaginative power of fiction to reframe political questions and how storytelling offers a way through the personal and collective ruptures that define our time.