Lost: A Novel - Hardcover

Maguire, Gregory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060393823 ISBN 13: 9780060393823

Publisher: William Morrow, 2001

Synopsis

“A brilliant, perceptive, and deeply moving fable.”
—Boston Sunday Globe

 

Publishers Weekly calls Gregory Maguire’s Lost “a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story.” Brilliantly weaving together the literary threads of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and the Jack the Ripper stories, the bestselling author of The Wicked Years canon creates a captivating fairy tale for the modern world. With Lost, Maguire—who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Oz, and inspired the creation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway blockbuster Wicked—delivers a haunting tale of shadows and phantoms and things going bump in the night, confirming his reputation as “one of contemporary fiction’s most assured myth-makers” (Kirkus Reviews).

About this title

From the Back Cover:

At the flat in Weatherall Walk there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit.... The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves.... Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John?

Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century rowhouse once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the spirit of this ancestor, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin?

Winnie begins to investigate, but John's erstwhile girlfriend, Allegra, is aggressively unhelpful, and his downstairs neighbor, the cat-obsessed Mrs. Maddingly, is growing stranger by the day. Gripped by inspiration and desperation alike, Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades, some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past.

In the spirit of A. S. Byatt's Possession, with dark overtones echoing from A Christmas Carol, Lostpresents a rich fictional world that will enrapture Gregory Maguire's eager audience.

About the Author:

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Lost; Mirror Mirror; and the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Now a beloved classic, Wicked is the basis for a blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0060393823
• ISBN 13: 9780060393823
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352