India, May 14 -- Big Brother was just the beginning. When surveillance shakes hands with capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff points out in her 2018 book on the subject, the system claims human experience "as free raw material for translation into behavioural data". This data is then used for everything from control to profit.

Sara, the protagonist of The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami's new novel set in the near future, experiences the consequences of such a system firsthand. Entire generations, she acknowledges, have been watched and recorded "from the womb to the grave". The result: they accept "corporate ownership of their personal data to be a fact of life, as natural as leaves growing on trees".

The Dream Hotel is set in a United States wher...