The Book of Lost Things

In wartime England, twelve-year-old David lives alone with his mother, who is gravely ill and slowly being consumed by her disease. To cope, David sets himself a set of strange rules: odd numbers are unlucky and only even numbers are safe; he must step out of bed with his left foot first and brush his teeth only up to the count of twenty. He believes that if he never makes a mistake, his mother's fate will change. But his mother dies anyway. His father remarries, and a new home, a stepmother, and a newborn half-brother follow in quick succession. Grief-stricken and afraid of being replaced, David grows increasingly isolated; only the old books his mother left behind offer him comfort. The fairy tales, myths, and folk legends he has read since childhood suddenly begin to speak to him, calling from the depths of the night and the woods. Following his mother's voice, David passes through the rift between reality and story and falls into a rewritten realm: familiar characters appear in monstrous forms, wolves, hunters, and dwarf knights each harbor their own schemes, and a shadow called the Crooked Man pulls the strings from behind the scenes. To return to his own world, he must cross Thistle Castle and the battlefield and find the forgotten Book of Lost Things. The novel wraps the flesh and blood of dark fairy tales around the skeleton of a coming-of-age story, exploring how loss, jealousy, fear, and forgiveness shape a person.