Mandel tells an utterly absorbing story, pulling readers down the rabbit hole and keeping them racing through its long, strange warrens. Eli follows Lilia to Montreal, lured there by the daughter of a private investigator who is obsessed with Lilia’s childhood disappearance. Lilia’s disappearance is crushing enough to dislodge her lover, Eli, from a life of miserable stasis spent writing a perpetually unfinished thesis and working a dull job at an art gallery. For her, it’s the continuation of a lifelong series of flights, which began as a little girl, when her father absconded with her and raised her as a fugitive, shuttling from one American town to the next, changing names and hair colours. On an October morning, Lilia Albert slips out of her lover’s apartment in Brooklyn and disappears. Mandel’s book is odd and fascinating: it’s a novel of ideas, with the shape and pace of a suspenseful mystery. They tumble into one another’s orbits, toil over dead languages, and fret over their inert lives. Newton’s second law of thermodynamics – all systems tend toward entropy – governs the characters in Emily St.
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