The Lost Story
A Novel
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- 7,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case—from the author of The Wishing Game.
“This is the book you’ve been waiting for.”—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls and the North Bath Trilogy
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.
Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.
Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.
Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shaffer (The Wishing Game) plays on portal fantasy nostalgia in this brilliant riff on the Chronicles of Narnia. Emilie Wendell is mourning the loss of her adoptive mother when she discovers she has a half-sister who was kidnapped 20 years ago. She begs the help of famous missing-persons investigator Jeremy Cox. Jeremy and his high school best friend, Rafe Howell, were lost as teenagers in West Virginia's Red Crow State Park and emerged six months later completely changed. Rafe, now an artist, can't remember what happened, and ever since the incident his drawings have returned to a fantastical world he can't explain. Jeremy knows the truth—that they went through a portal into that other realm—but he's bound by a promise not to reveal the truth to Rafe. When Rafe joins in the search for Emilia's long-lost sister, the investigation takes both men back to the wondrous but deadly world they once loved. Shaffer manages to capture the joys and magic of childhood innocence alongside the wisdom that comes with age and the heartache and scars that make it difficult to go home again. The taut mystery keeps the pages of this love letter to the fantasy genre flying. Readers will be transfixed.
