Author Gregory Maguire, best known for his clever Wicked, ventures forth here without a safety net, concocting a story that's all his own. Without the constraints of having to hew to the plot lines of a tale familiar to us all, Maguire creates something that's all his. Lost examines, deconstructs, and riffs on English children's stories and Dante's Inferno, beginning with a blocked hack writer named Winifred Rudge leaving her native Boston for a visit to her step cousin's flat in London, a flat in a house that was built by one of her ancestors, a man who may have been the inspiration for Dickens's Scrooge. Winnie is in London to research a novel linking Jack the Ripper to the house in Hampstead where her own great great grandfather, rumored to be the model for Ebenezer Scrooge, lived.
Winnie tries to cope with the absence of her step cousin, John Comestor, by ordering contractors around and making myriad and unsuccessful efforts to find him. She meets a series of eccentric people and possibly encounters a haunting in the house, which is rumored to be Jack the Ripper's. The book explores themes of loss, finding oneself after tragedy, and the interplay between family history and personal identity.
From The Publisher:
"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).
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