The Book of Lost Things

About The Book of Lost Things

The Book of Lost Things follows David, a grieving boy in wartime England who retreats into books after his mother's death and his father's swift remarriage, until the boundary between his world and a dark, half-remembered version of fairy-tale land gives way and pulls him through. What he finds isn't the sanitized version of these stories: Connolly's fairy-tale world is genuinely frightening, populated by a Crooked Man who trades in children's names, a Woodsman, wolves evolving toward human intelligence, and corrupted versions of Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood stripped of any comfort, with David's journey toward a decaying king's castle functioning as both an adventure and an unusually direct grief narrative for a boy who is, underneath the fantasy, trying to process real loss.

The Land of Lost Things, published seventeen years later, returns to the edges of the same world through a new central character: Ceres, a mother keeping vigil over her comatose daughter Phoebe, who is pulled into the same fractured land while searching for a way to reach her. It's a genuine continuation of the world and its rules rather than a fresh reboot, revisiting some of the first book's territory and mythology from an adult's vantage point, with grief again at the story's center -- this time a parent's rather than a child's.

How to read this series

Read The Book of Lost Things (2006) before The Land of Lost Things (2023) -- the second novel assumes familiarity with the first book's version of the fairy-tale world, its rules, and several of its recurring figures, even though its protagonist and central story are new. There's a seventeen-year gap between the two books and no other volumes in between; this is a duology rather than an ongoing series, and Connolly has not indicated plans for a third entry. Both books stand apart from Connolly's Charlie Parker crime novels and his Samuel Johnson trilogy -- this is his most purely literary fantasy work.