The Lola Quartet
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4.2 • 16 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
How far would you go for someone you love?
The Lola Quartet: Jack, Daniel, Sasha and Gavin, four talented musicians at the end of their high school careers. On the dream-like night of their last concert, Gavin's girlfriend Anna disappears. Ten years later Gavin sees a photograph of a little girl who looks uncannily like him and who shares Anna's surname, and suddenly he finds himself catapulted back to a secretive past he didn't realize he'd left behind.
But that photo has set off a cascade of dangerous consequences and, as one by one the members of the Lola Quartet are reunited, a terrifying story emerges: of innocent mistakes, of secrecy and of a life lived on the run.
Filled with love, music and thwarted dreams, Emily St. John Mandel's The Lola Quartet is a thrilling novel about how the errors of the past can threaten the future.
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.
