Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal

"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 others' eyes—the private detective who became obsessed with her case, his daughter, and Eli, the latest of her abandoned lovers.

Last Night in Montreal is a powerful read—an unusual story, very well told. It's also dispiriting, not only because of the facts of Lilia's life, but because the principals of Mandel's story are all rootless and unsatisfied. But it's a compulsively readable book. I downed it in two days and might have been quicker if the obligations of my own rooted existence hadn't interfered. In the end I did have problems with the story's credibility. Mostly I find it hard to believe that the private detective on Lilia's tail would abandon his life in order to track her down, that he would continue tracking her after he found her. But the book raises any number of interesting questions, among them the reasons for this obsession of his, which leads him to treat his own daughter more horribly than the kidnapper he's chasing treats Lilia. I also am not sure that it made sense to make the private detective and his wife former circus people, but perhaps I'm missing some thematic relevance here. That the book raises so many questions would make it a good selection for book discussion groups. And maybe for Oprah as well, if she's reading this. (And I know you are, Oprah. I know you are.)