Overview

Lilia Albert has been leaving people behind for her entire life. She spends her childhood and adolescence traveling constantly and changing identities. In adulthood, she finds it impossible to stop. Haunted by an inability to remember her early childhood, she moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers along with way, possibly still followed by a private detective who has pursued her for years. Then her latest lover follows her from New York to Montreal, determined to learn her secrets and make sure she s safe. Last Night in Montreal is a story of love, amnesia, compulsive travel, the depths and the limits of family bonds, and the nature of obsession. In this extraordinary debut, Emily St. John Mandel casts a powerful spell that captures the reader in a gritty, youthful worldcharged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and forebodingwhere small revelations continuously change our understanding of the truth and lead to desperate consequences. Mandel s characters will resonate with you long after the final page is turned.

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9781936071609

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Reviews

I knew it belonged with all those other books on my bookshelves that make me happy just knowing that they're there ...The story is important (and the ending is breathtaking), but the plot details are not -- to me -- the most important aspect of Mandel's novel. For me, that would be the characters and the writing. Each of the characters -- major and minor -- is wholly alive, three-dimensional in all their complexity, bad choices, general quirkiness and flawed decisions...And the writing simply blew me away. --Nancy Pearl on NPR's Morning Edition [A] taut, gripping debut ... elegantly compelling. --Booklist The pages fly, and the final period leaves a palpable sense of loss. --Paste Magazine Mandel chooses her words with careful love and arranges them to exquisite effect. At its heart this book is a mystery, a few mysteries; we wait and we wonder while being charmed by Mandel's intricate narrative dance which threads three different moving plot lines together into a perfectly tangled tapestry. Like a tightrope walker's steps above a cobblestoned alley, her lines follow each other with near breathless precision and echo delicately long after the final page has been turned. --ForeWord Magazine Mandel tells an utterly absorbing story, pulling readers down the rabbit hole and keeping them racing through its long, strange warrens. The writing is vibrant, and Lilia is a vivid and haunting character. ... Last Night in Montreal is an exciting debut: a thriller, a love story, and a quiet ballad about life's fleeting connections. --Quill & Quire What carries the tale are the finely wrought characterizations of Eli and Lilia and, unexpectedly, Christopher, the detective, who becomes an essential cog in the expanding machinery of Mandel's plot - yet the book remains far from a whodunit. What we're made to ponder is the mystery of human connection: how it is born, how it fades and dies and revives, how love defines us or leaves us undone. --The Globe and Mail

I knew it belonged with all those other books on my bookshelves that make me happy just knowing that they're there ...The story is important (and the ending is breathtaking), but the plot details are not -- to me -- the most important aspect of Mandel's novel. For me, that would be the characters and the writing. Each of the characters -- major and minor -- is wholly alive, three-dimensional in all their complexity, bad choices, general quirkiness and flawed decisions...And the writing simply blew me away. --Nancy Pearl on NPR's Morning Edition <br> [A] taut, gripping debut ... elegantly compelling. --Booklist <br> The pages fly, and the final period leaves a palpable sense of loss. --Paste Magazine <br> Mandel chooses her words with careful love and arranges them to exquisite effect. At its heart this book is a mystery, a few mysteries; we wait and we wonder while being charmed by Mandel's intricate narrative dance which threads three different moving plot lines together into a perfectly tangled tapestry. Like a tightrope walker's steps above a cobblestoned alley, her lines follow each other with near breathless precision and echo delicately long after the final page has been turned. --ForeWord Magazine <br> Mandel tells an utterly absorbing story, pulling readers down the rabbit hole and keeping them racing through its long, strange warrens. The writing is vibrant, and Lilia is a vivid and haunting character. ... Last Night in Montreal is an exciting debut: a thriller, a love story, and a quiet ballad about life's fleeting connections. --Quill & Quire <br> What carries the tale are the finely wrought characterizations of Eli and Lilia and, unexpectedly, Christopher, the detective, who becomes an essential cog in the expanding machinery of Mandel's plot - yet the book remains far from a whodunit. What we're made to ponder is the mystery of human connection: how it is born, how it fades and dies and revives, how love defines us or leaves us undone.

I knew it belonged with all those other books on my bookshelves that make me happy just knowing that they're there ...The story is important (and the ending is breathtaking), but the plot details are not -- to me -- the most important aspect of Mandel's novel. For me, that would be the characters and the writing. Each of the characters -- major and minor -- is wholly alive, three-dimensional in all their complexity, bad choices, general quirkiness and flawed decisions...And the writing simply blew me away. --Nancy Pearl on NPR's Morning Edition [A] taut, gripping debut ... elegantly compelling. --Booklist The pages fly, and the final period leaves a palpable sense of loss. --Paste Magazine Mandel chooses her words with careful love and arranges them to exquisite effect. At its heart this book is a mystery, a few mysteries; we wait and we wonder while being charmed by Mandel's intricate narrative dance which threads three different moving plot lines together into a perfectly tangled tapestry. Like a tightrope walker's steps above a cobblestoned alley, her lines follow each other with near breathless precision and echo delicately long after the final page has been turned. --ForeWord Magazine Mandel tells an utterly absorbing story, pulling readers down the rabbit hole and keeping them racing through its long, strange warrens. The writing is vibrant, and Lilia is a vivid and haunting character. ... Last Night in Montreal is an exciting debut: a thriller, a love story, and a quiet ballad about life's fleeting connections. --Quill & Quire What carries the tale are the finely wrought characterizations of Eli and Lilia and, unexpectedly, Christopher, the detective, who becomes an essential cog in the expanding machinery of Mandel's plot - yet the book remains far from a whodunit. What we're made to ponder is the mystery of human connection: how it is born, how it fades and dies and revives, how love defines us or leaves us undone.

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