Her characters are almost never carefree jet-setters. Mandel favours settings in which travel and improbable meetings are inherent: hotels, bars, cargo ships. Mandel is going places, even though she specializes in stories about characters who can’t be sure where they’re going. Her characters’ rootlessness is a central feature of her six novels, including the 2014 bestseller Station Eleven and 2020′s The Glass Hotel, which found its way onto Barack Obama’s year-end reading list and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. John Mandel novel does: with a kind of free-floating bemusement she wears lightly but can’t shake. She was relating to her surroundings, in other words, much as a character in an Emily St. So I’m the non-driving person with a UV-resistant sun umbrella walking down the street. She doesn’t really fit, she told me on a Zoom call. Still, this latest visit to the city was by far the longest of her life. As a teenager in the 1990s she used to stay with him in his hometown and make day trips into Los Angeles. Mandel was raised on Vancouver Island and in the British Columbia Gulf Islands, but her father was Californian, a plumber from Ventura County. John Mandel, she and her family were on an extended working visit to Los Angeles.
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