Last Night in Montreal [Hardcover]

Emily St. John Mandel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A young woman with a habit of running away runs away yet again in Mandel's competent if unremarkable debut. As Eli finishes another grim day of work on his thesis (its topic: dead and dying languages) in his Brooklyn apartment, he realizes his girlfriend, Lilia, never returned after going out for the newspaper that morning. About a month later, Eli gets a postcard from someone named Michaela in Montreal telling him that Lilia is there, so he heads north, leaving (thankfully) his insufferable friends behind to natter on about art without him. His quest is interspersed with flashbacks to Lilia's childhood: her father kidnaps her at age seven from her mother's house, and the two go on the lam. Back in present-day Montreal, Eli meets Michaela, who happens to be the daughter of the detective who years ago worked on Lilia's abduction case, and together they try to fill in the blanks of Lilia's past. While the plot is interesting enough, the prose often feels forced and the characters sometimes amount to accumulations of quirks, whimsies and neuroses. An intriguing idea, but the delivery isn't quite there. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

When Lilia Albert is seven, the father she has not seen in more than a year suddenly appears in the middle of the night and steals her away from her rural Canadian home. She is never again seen by her mother or brother. Instead, her independently wealthy dad moves her from one U.S. city to another, along the way educating her in matters both practical and not. Is he a spurned ex-husband who refuses to accept the court's custody decision? Or is he Lilia's savior, taking her away from something awful? When the novel opens, Lilia is a twentysomething Brooklyn dishwasher living with a disgruntled grad student named Eli Jacobs. When Lilia unceremoniously leaves him—a pattern she's perfected—Eli is bereft. As he obsessively searches for her, the story integrates the viewpoints of private investigator Christopher Graydon and Graydon's neglected daughter, Michaela, who has long resented Lilia's looming presence in her family's life. While the plot is occasionally contrived, the fast pacing and unusual characters make this a compelling first novel. Highly recommended for all contemporary fiction collections.—Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books; 1 edition (June 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932961682
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961683
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,097,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Emily St. John Mandel was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

Her new novel, The Lola Quartet, is coming out in May 2012. Her other novels are Last Night in Montreal (a June 2009 Indie Next pick and a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's 2009 Book of the Year award) and The Singer's Gun (winner of an Indie Booksellers Choice Award, #1 Indie Next Pick for May 2010, included on a number of flattering lists.) She is married and lives in Brooklyn.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Intelligent Read, March 28, 2010

By 

Manda Kay "Manda Reads" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Night in Montreal (Hardcover)

When Lilia says she is stepping out for coffee and never returns, Eli does not imagine the past he will uncover when he searches for her. A mysterious postcard from Montreal sends Eli on a wild goose chase that introduces him to a strange girl named Michaela and a few stories neither of them are ready to hear. Filled with a broken past, lost loves, and crazy moments at every turn, Last Night In Montreal is a wild ride with an amazing twist.

I absolutely adored this book. This is Emily St. John Mandel's first novel and it was stellar. The writing was intelligent and masterful. The plot was new and exciting. I loved the structure of the story and how Mandel presented both the present and the past. I was drawn into this story almost immediately and could not tear myself away from it. I love that the pain and the hurt are so real in this book, but they are not overwhelming to the point of disbelief. Though you do not get a lot about herself from Lilia's point of view, I felt that I learned so much about her from the other characters. Eli was an amazing character and I really loved everything about him. He is incredibly brilliant and some of the discussions he has about the artistic world are just amazing. The references to linguistics and dialects have me wanting to research these topics after reading about them. Mandel did an amazing job with this novel and I can not wait to read more of what she writes in the future.

Review originally posted on my blog Draw A Blank.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Unbridled Books. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255 : "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating--Mandel is a talent to watch, May 17, 2009

By 

Donald L. Linn "reader53" (Southbury, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last Night in Montreal (Hardcover)

When I first heard that the protagonist of Last Night in Montreal was unable to remember her childhood, I was concerned about finding a cliched amnesia story. Not at all. Through carefully drawn characters and pitch-perfect descriptions of Lily's obsessions and abandonments, Emily Mandel drew me in quickly and held my interest through the final page. I want more.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this is a helluva beautifully wonderful book, May 19, 2010

By 

R. A. Frauenglas "Brooklyn Bum" (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last Night in Montreal (Paperback)

This is a helluva beautifully wonderful book. It is gorgeously written. Sentences are both poetic & noir, like a female Hemingway. Tough & tender. I had previously reached page 128 & then started reading again at midnight & couldn't stop until I finished the book at 2 a.m.
I was totally engrossed by the characters & the story. Childhood abduction. Childhood saving. A too sentimental private eye with apparent ESP. Two families torn apart. Love. A love of travel. An inability to stop moving from place to place. An ability to make connections with people. Quickly & deeply. Intelligence. A father loving a daughter enough to make her the center of his life until she leaves him to make a life of her own. A young man willing to lose everything to search for the woman he loves even though she told him she always leaves, in the end. Traveling circus people. Stops in Brooklyn, New Mexico, Arizona, Montreal, & Rome. Children saving children. Disappearances. Abandonment. Suicide. Attempted suicides. Stopping & finding love & having children. An ending which breaks my heart, but is supposed to be a happy one.
I loved this book!