Lost & Found
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
‘If you liked Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, you'll like this’ Metro
‘Will generate the same feel-good word of mouth as last year’s bestseller, The Rosie Project’ Sydney Morning Herald
Millie Bird is seven-years-old. On a shopping trip with her mum, Millie is left alone beneath the Ginormous Women’s underwear rack in a department store. Her mum never returns.
Agatha Pantha is eighty-two and hasn’t left home since her husband died. Instead, she fills the silence by yelling at passers-by, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule. Until the day Agatha spies a little girl across the street.
Karl the Touch Typist is eighty-seven and in a nursing home. He remembers how he once typed love letters with his fingers on to his wife’s skin. Now widowed, he knows that somehow he must find a way for life to begin again. In a moment of clarity, he escapes.
Together, Millie, Agatha and Karl set out to find Millie’s mum. And along the way, they will discover that the young can be wise, that old age is not the same as death, and that breaking the rules once in a while might just be the key to a happy life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Funny, sad and unabashedly charming, this fantastic debut from Australian writer Brooke Davis follows Millie Bird, an odd and wise seven-year-old who’s abandoned in a department store. As Millie creates a surrogate family for herself amid the clothing racks, makeup counters, and toy displays—and then embarks on an impromptu journey across Australia—she brings together a cast of damaged and isolated characters drawn to her sincerity and quirks.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This novel by Australian travel writer and first-time novelist Davis attempts to use whimsy as a delivery mechanism for a meditation on loss and loneliness among the very young and very old. Seven-year-old Millie Bird is obsessed with death, inscribing her encounters with dead things in a "Book of Dead Things." Entry twenty-eight is "MY DAD." As a result of losing her husband and Millie's father, it's not long before Millie's unstable mother drops her at a Perth department store by the "Ginormous Women's Underwear" section and never returns. Millie spends a couple of nights hiding out in the store, seemingly undetected by anyone except a mannequin she treats as a companion and an old man she approaches in the store's caf who identifies himself as "Karl the Touch Typist." Karl is battling his own grief after the loss of his wife. Finally caught by store security, Millie, with Karl's help, escapes authorities and makes her way home, where an elderly neighbor, Agatha Pantha, an unpleasant shut-in following her husband's death, somehow decides it would be better to accompany Millie to find her mother in Melbourne than to call the police. Karl catches up with them and the unlikely trio travels across Australia. Ultimately, this journey toward understanding and accepting death is too predictable, offering little aside from the quirks of its characters.
