In the novel's opening, Vincent falls from a ship and sinks into the ocean with flashes of fragmented memory.

Paul offers tainted ecstasy pills to the members of Baltica at a Toronto bar, and they accept.

Baltica's keyboardist Charlie Wu dies of a heart attack hours after taking Paul's pills.

A violent message is discovered etched in acid paste on a large window of the remote Hotel Caiette.

Jonathan Alkaitis arrives late at Hotel Caiette and has a long, intimate late-night conversation with bartender Vincent.

The hotel's shift manager fires Paul, and Vincent unexpectedly departs the hotel the same morning.

Vincent moves into Alkaitis's Connecticut mansion and lives as his companion in a comfortable but loveless arrangement.

Olivia Collins sells her painting for $200,000 and is introduced to Jonathan Alkaitis as an investment advisor.

Jonathan Alkaitis sits in a minimum-security prison, retreating into an elaborate fantasy he calls the counterlife.

After hiding upstate following Alkaitis's arrest, Vincent takes a job as a crew member on the container ship Neptune Cumberland.

Vincent discovers Paul is headlining concerts at a major performance venue using her stolen home movies as a backdrop.

Vincent is summoned to Alkaitis's office and informed for the first time that his entire investment empire is a Ponzi scheme.

FBI agents raid Alkaitis's Connecticut home in the early morning hours, bringing his scheme to a close.

Alkaitis pleads guilty at trial and receives a prison sentence of 170 years.

Vincent ignores Geoffrey Bell's warnings about the storm, returns to the deck to film, and falls overboard.

The Glass Hotel opens with Vincent disappearing into the ocean and then traces the chain of events that led her there, beginning with her half-brother Paul's role in a young musician's death. Vincent's life shifts entirely when she meets the wealthy financier Jonathan Alkaitis at a remote hotel and becomes his companion in a loveless but materially comfortable arrangement. Meanwhile, Alkaitis's investment empire is a massive fraud that eventually collapses in the financial crisis, sending him to prison and scattering his victims. In the wreckage, Vincent reinvents herself anonymously as a cook aboard a container ship, finding a measure of freedom she had never known before. The novel closes where it began, with Vincent's final reckless act of filming in a storm and her drowning death at sea.

The headline events of Vincent's life and Alkaitis's Ponzi scheme.

While sinking in the ocean, Vincent flashes to a memory of filming at sea and whispering for a home she cannot return to.

Paul attends a goth club concert and becomes infatuated with Annika, the lead singer of a band called Baltica.

Paul travels to Vancouver to visit his half-sister Vincent, fleeing Toronto and the guilt over Charlie Wu's death.

Leon Prevant sits alone at the Hotel Caiette bar in the early hours, deeply troubled by mounting financial pressures.

Alkaitis strikes up a conversation with Leon Prevant at the hotel bar and steers him toward an investment opportunity.

Vincent befriends Mirella, a woman also married into wealth, who shares her sense of displacement in Alkaitis's world.

Reporter Ella Kaspersky begins following Alkaitis's company, publicly warning that his financial products cannot survive legal scrutiny.

Young Olivia proposes a mutual modeling exchange with Lucas Alkaitis, defying the assumption that he should only observe her.

Olivia's portrait of Lucas is publicly displayed and a furious Lucas confronts her about it, dragging his young brother Jonathan along.

Vincent serves Mirella at a Chelsea bar, but Mirella pretends not to recognize her former friend.

In his prison cell, Alkaitis hallucinates that the dead Faisal is sitting across from him.

Alkaitis enlists receptionist Simone to purchase shredders and spend hours destroying incriminating documents before his arrest.

Olivia Collins joins the crowd of angry investors gathered outside Alkaitis's office building after news of the fraud breaks.

In prison, Alkaitis learns from journalist Julie Freeman that Olivia Collins died the previous month.

Paul collapses under a streetlight in Edinburgh and imagines he sees Vincent staring at him from across the street.

Beneath the headline events of the novel lies a web of secondary moments that give the story its texture and moral weight. Paul's obsession with the singer Annika leads him to a concert that sets the tragedy with Charlie Wu in motion, and his guilt drives him to his sister Vincent. At the Hotel Caiette, Leon Prevant's vulnerable financial state makes him easy prey for Alkaitis's investment pitch, sealing his ruin. Vincent's friendship with Mirella offers her rare warmth in her gilded life, but that friendship is severed after the scheme's collapse. In prison, Alkaitis's grip on reality slowly loosens, haunted by the ghost of Faisal while Olivia Collins slowly fades from the world outside. The novel ends with Paul collapsed on a street in Edinburgh, haunted by a vision of the sister he wronged on the very night she disappears.

The supporting moments and secondary characters who shaped the story's world.

As Vincent drowns in the opening scene, she flashes back to a childhood memory of reading the words 'Sweep me up' on a school window.

After fleeing Toronto, Paul sees a hallucination of the recently dead Charlie Wu dancing in a nightclub crowd.

Paul recalls that a young Vincent once scrawled the words 'Sweep me up' on a school window with an acid marker, which led to her being sent away.

Hotel manager Walter reviews surveillance footage and circumstantial evidence, concluding Paul wrote the graffiti under someone else's instructions.

Vincent tells Alkaitis's daughter Claire that she was named after the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Vincent buys a professional video camera and deepens her private practice of recording precise five-minute home movies.

The narrator reveals that Lucas Alkaitis died of a drug overdose behind a restaurant, ten months after Olivia's portrait was displayed.

A prison therapist tests Alkaitis and finds that his short-term memory and grip on reality are beginning to fail.

Vincent sees a hallucination of her dead mother on a Manhattan street on the eve of the financial collapse.

Oskar wakes in Vincent's apartment, recognizes Olivia Collins's signature on the painting hanging on the wall, and is overcome with guilt.

Leon Prevant learns while at a shipping conference that his entire life savings invested with Alkaitis are gone.

Alkaitis reveals to his interviewer that his dying wife Suzanne was the one who first said 'Why don't you swallow broken glass' to reporter Kaspersky.

A ship's steward tells investigators that Geoffrey Bell once struck another woman and threatened to throw her overboard.

Paul reveals he was paid by journalist Ella Kaspersky to write the threatening graffiti on the Hotel Caiette window.

As Vincent sinks beneath the ocean, she sees visions of Geoffrey mourning, Paul apologizing, and her mother waiting on a beach.

The Glass Hotel is built on a series of hidden connections and revelations that only come into focus gradually. The words swept across a schoolroom window by a teenage Vincent echo through the whole novel, linking her childhood displacement to her final dissolution at sea. The graffiti at Hotel Caiette—seemingly spontaneous—turns out to have been a paid act of sabotage, tying Paul's weakness to the chain of events that brought Vincent into Alkaitis's orbit. As Alkaitis's memory crumbles in prison, secrets emerge, including his wife Suzanne's knowing complicity in the fraud. Meanwhile, Leon Prevant's investigation uncovers uncomfortable truths about Geoffrey Bell that complicate the story of Vincent's disappearance. The novel closes with Vincent's death rendered as a kaleidoscopic vision in which she finally rejoins her mother, the loss that set everything in motion.

The key decisions, hidden truths, and emotional shifts that drove the novel forward.