The Lola Quartet

( 1 )

All Available Formats + Editions

——

$8.49

NOOK Book

——

$8.49

The Lola Quartet (eBook) Pub. Date: 5/15/2012 Publisher: Unbridled Books
$12.45

$15.97

Hardcover

$12.45

$15.97

The Lola Quartet Pub. Date: 5/1/2012 Publisher: Unbridled Books
——

$62.60

Audiobook

——

$62.60

The Lola Quartet (Cassette) Pub. Date: 6/30/2012 Publisher: Recorded Books, LLC
——

$33.97

Other Format

——

$33.97

The Lola Quartet Pub. Date: 6/30/2012 Publisher: Recorded Books, LLC

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

Advertising

Overview

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 is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s drifting toward bankruptcy and is in 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Mandel (The Singer’s Gun) strikes a confident chord in her third novel. Ten years after graduating from a performing arts high school in Florida, the members of the Lola Quartet are far from the futures they imagined during their final jazz concert in school. Gavin, who fled south Florida’s stifling heat for New York, returns after losing his journalism job in disgrace to learn that he may be the father of a 10-year-old girl named Chloe. As he investigates Chloe and her mother’s whereabouts, he attempts to reconnect with his Lola friends, all coping with disillusion: Daniel has divorced twice; Jack and Sasha have succumbed to addiction. Gavin’s sentiment that “real people are so goddamn disappointing” not only explains his penchant for plagiarizing his articles but also applies to the adult lives of Mandel’s characters. The author again melds mystery plotting with literary techniques like shifting points-of-view, resulting in both sophistication and suspense; the mystery doesn’t quite pay off, but Mandel’s novel excels as a character study that considers the slow degradation of hopes, dreams, and expectations of people who are only in their late 20s but already feel ancient. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (May)

Library Journal

In her riveting third novel (following The Singer's Gun), Mandel evokes murky Florida suburbs and smoky New York jazz clubs. A loosely gathered high school jazz quartet unravels after graduation as the musicians go their separate ways. Ten years later, their uncertain paths may cross once again after youthful hopes and dreams are pushed aside by harsh, dangerous realities. The economic downturn, coupled with a host of erratic decisions, leads to lives of quiet desperation. The story is anchored by Gavin, who imagines himself to be a gumshoe detective while wilting in the Florida heat; his obsessive search for a former love propels the story forward. One of Mandel's gifts is her ability to drop nearly invisible clues as to how these four disparate lives might intersect once more. Her conclusion turns on a dime. VERDICT Evocative, intriguing, and complex, this novel is as smooth as the underbelly of a deadly, furtive reptile. Mandel's substantial fan base will rejoice; word of mouth will bring new fans on board.—Susanne Wells, Indianapolis

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

Anna Mundow

…elegant, hypnotic…Mandel brilliantly modulates the heightening suspense in a novel that remains, above all, an elegy for lost—and perhaps only imagined—innocence.
—The Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609530792
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Publication date: 5/1/2012
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 275,082
Product dimensions: 6.22 (w) x 9.04 (h) x 1.06 (d)

Meet the Author

Emily St. John Mandel was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York. Her first novel, Last Night in Montreal was a June 2009 Indie Next pick and a finalist for Foreword Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, recently released in paperback, won the Indie Bookseller’s Choice Award and was the number-one Indie Next Pick for May 2010. It was also long-listed for The Morning News’ 2011 Tournament of Books and the 2011 Spinetingler Awards.

She is currently a staff writer for The Millions, and she’s had both essays and short fiction recently anthologized.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3

( 1 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(1)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines

Tell the world what you think of this product.

Add Recommendations

Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

- HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
- Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
- Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
- Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
- Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
- Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
- Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
- See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.

ChelseaW

Posted May 2, 2012

more from this reviewer

I really enjoyed Emily St. John's first book, Last Night in Mont

I really enjoyed Emily St. John's first book, Last Night in Montreal, and her second, The Signer's Gun, was just okay. This third novel is somewhere between the two.

The first thing I noticed was that like her first book, this was again about a mysterious girl and a man out to find her. Oh how I love stories like this! I just can't get enough of guys tortured by the girl that got away. The pain of wanting and having loved these women is completely romantic. The second thing I noticed is Emily's signature calm and poetic writing. Her sentences always seem to lure me into a sense of peacefulness, even with tense scenes. Reading her work is very comfortable!

The book is divided into three parts, and where the first part caught my full attention, the middle began to lose me a bit. I was still interested in the fate of the characters I was reading about (especially Gavin and Anna) but I think too many other characters were the focus of the second section and didn't appeal to me. The ending was both rewarding and shocking. I wished the climax had actually happened earlier in the book, so that we could watch the characters move forward with their lives afterward longer than we did. In this case, that was the more intriguing element for me.

Emily St. John is proving herself to be a master of writing about people pushed to the brink by desperation. I look forward to seeing what she has for us next.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble