St. John Mandel, Emily: Last Night in Montreal

Unbridled © 2009, 247 pages

"No one stays forever," reads the first line of Emily St. John Mandel's debut novel Last Night in Montreal. Certainly Mandel's main character can't stay in one place for longer than a few months, if that. Abducted when she was seven by her non-custodial parent, Lilia spent her childhood in a car--nine years of motels and chain restaurants and public parks, dyed hair and name changes, her picture and her grieving mother on their room's flickering TV screen before they fled again in the middle of the night. The book slowly circles around Lilia's story until we get the whole of it, skipping around in time and among perspectives: Lilia's own, when she was younger; and later we see her mostly through other's eyes--the private detective who became obsessed with her case, his daughter, and Eli, the latest of her abandoned lovers.

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