Description:
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 world--charged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and foreboding--where 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.
Review Quotes: "Breathtaking. . . . Simply blew me away."--Nancy Pearl, NPR, "Morning Edition"
"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