Emily St. John Mandel is one of my favorite writers and Last Night in Montreal is a stellar achievement, though much more subtle than her subsequent novels about pandemics and Ponzi schemes. With prose as swift as a painter’s brush, she meditates on love, loss, and loneliness through characters quietly breaking on the inside, and looking for anything, anyone, to help put them back together.
— Gage
June 2009 Indie Next List
“Last Night in Montreal is a rare achievement, a gripping, mysterious, and original literary novel about family secrets and the unbearable weight they place on young shoulders. Emily St. John Mandel is a wonderful and refreshingly unorthodox writer, and this should be the start of a brilliant career.”
— Rich Rennicks, Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC
Description
From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility—when Lilia Albert was a child, her father appeared on the doorstep of her mother's house and took her away. Now, haunted by an inability to remember much about her early childhood, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and eluding the private detective who has dedicated a career to following close behind.
Then comes Eli. When Lilia goes out for a paper and fails to return to their Brooklyn apartment, he follows her to Montreal, not knowing whether he wants to disappear, too, or help her find her way home. But what he discovers is a deeper mystery, one that will set past and present spinning toward collision.
Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!
About the Author
EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL's five previous novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives in New York City.
“Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing.” —Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers
“Stunning. . . . A brilliant tale of desperation and identity.” —Richmond Review
“Lilia is more or less Newton’s first law of motion personified. . . . [A] knot of a novel.” —The New York Times “[Mandel’s] writing is pure elegance.” —Patrick DeWitt, author of Sisters Brothers
“[Mandel] is a stunningly beautiful writer whose complex, flawed, and well-drawn characters linger with you.” —Sarah McCarry, Tor.com
“The pages fly.” —Paste
“Last Night in Montreal is an exciting debut: a thriller, a love story, and a quiet ballad about life's fleeting connections.” —Quill & Quire
“Taut, gripping. . . . The lost souls in this elegantly compelling novel are lost to themselves as much as they are to others.” —Booklist
“Mandel is a terrific writer, so good that even the furthest reaches of her tale make perfect sense.” —PopMatters.com “Shockingly real, and so hard to put down.” —Three Guys One Book “Exquisite. . . . 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.” —Foreword magazine
“Last Night in Montreal is a rare achievement, a gripping, mysterious, and original literary novel about family secrets and the unbearable weight they place on young shoulders. Emily St. John Mandel is a wonderful and refreshingly unorthodox writer, and this should be the start of a brilliant career.”