The Lola Quartet - by Emily St John Mandel (Paperback)

About the Book

Disgraced and fired from his newspaper job, a young man returns to the Florida town where he grew up and begins to search for a daughter who he has only recently learned may exist and who may be at considerable risk.
Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he's fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It's early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly; the economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do in return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he's drifting toward bankruptcy and is no position to refuse when he's offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes.
Eilo recently paid a visit to a home that had a ten-year-old child in it, a child who looks very much like Gavin and who has the same last name as Gavin's high school girlfriend Anna, whom Gavin last saw a decade ago. Gavin--a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed properties, obsessed with film noir and private detectives--begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter who have been on the run all these years from a drug dealer from whom Anna stole $121,000.
In her most ambitious novel yet, Emily Mandel combines her most fully realized characters with perhaps her most fully developed story that examines the difficulty of being the person you'd like to be, loss, the way a small and innocent action (e.g., taking a picture of a girl in a foreclosed house) can have disastrous consequences. The Lola Quartet is a work that pays homage to literary noir, is concerned with jazz, Django Reinhardt, economic collapse, love, Florida's exotic wildlife problem, crushing tropical heat, the leavening of the contemporary world, compulsive gambling, and the unreliability of memory.
This is literary fiction with a strong detective story element.

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility--Gavin Sasaki was a promising young journalist in New York City until the day he was fired for plagiarism.

The last thing he wants is to sell foreclosed real estate for his sister Eilo's company in their Florida hometown, but he's in no position to refuse her job offer. Plus, there's another reason to go home: Eilo recently met a ten-year-old girl who looks very much like Gavin and has the same last name as his high-school girlfriend, Anna, who left town abruptly after graduation.

Determined to find out if this little girl might be his daughter, Gavin sets off to track down Anna, starting with the three friends they shared back when he was part of a jazz group called "The Lola Quartet." As Gavin pieces together their stories, he learns that Anna has been on the run for good reason, and soon his investigation into her sudden disappearance all those years ago takes a seriously dangerous turn.

Look for Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

Review Quotes

"[An] ingeniously constructed literary thriller."-- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[An] elegant, hypnotic novel. . . . An elegy for lost--and perhaps only imagined--innocence." --The Washington Post

"Compelling. . . . Perhaps all novelists can be said to wrestle with morality; Mandel seems to wrestle with it at greater length and in greater depth than most. . . . First-rate fiction." --Dallas Morning News

"A novel noir that wears its influences proudly on the beige sleeve of its trench coat.... Delightful." --Paste

"Trumpets [Mandel's] talents: her charismatic verbal grace and acuity, the rich atmosphere she creates." --The Boston Globe

"Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing." --Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers

"[Mandel] is a stunningly beautiful writer whose complex, flawed, and well-drawn characters linger with you." --Sarah McCarry, Tor.com

"Fascinating." --Booklist

"Riveting. . . . Evocative, intriguing, and complex, this novel is as smooth as the underbelly of a deadly, furtive reptile." --Library Journal (starred review)

"A rewarding read." --Foreword magazine

"Result[s] in both sophistication and suspense." --Publishers Weekly

"[Mandel's] writing is pure elegance." --Patrick DeWitt, author of Sisters Brothers

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.