The Secret of Lost Things
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3.8 • 9 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Eighteen years old and completely alone, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little other than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city. Taking a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books called the Arcade, she knows she has found a home. But when Rosemary reads a letter from someone seeking to “place” a lost manuscript by Herman Melville, the bookstore erupts with simmering ambitions and rivalries. Including actual correspondence by Melville, The Secret of Lost Things is at once a literary adventure and evocative portrait of a young woman making a life for herself in the city.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hay's debut has all the elements of a literary thriller, but they\t\t don't quite come together. Arriving in New York from Tasmania with $300, her\t\t mother's ashes and a love of reading, 18-year-old Rosemary Savage finds work in\t\t the Arcade Bookshop, a huge, labyrinthine place that features everything from\t\t overstock to rare books. In its physicality, the store greatly resembles New\t\t York's Strand (where Hay worked), and its requisite assortment of intriguing\t\t bookish oddballs includes autocratic owner George Pike and his albino\t\t assistant, Walter Geist. Rosemary is suspicious and worried when Walter enlists\t\t Rosemary's help to respond to an anonymous request to sell a hand-written\t\t version of Herman Melville's lost Isle of the\t\t Cross (a novel that in fact existed but disappeared after Melville's\t\t publisher rejected it). She confides in Oscar (the attractive, emotionally\t\t unavailable nonfiction specialist), which only hastens the deal's momentum\t\t toward disaster. Hay does a good job with innocent, intelligent Rosemary's\t\t attempts to deal with sinister doings, and methodically imagines the evolution\t\t and content of Melville's novel (which features a woman abandoned much like\t\t Rosemary's mother). Hay also ably captures Rosemary's nostalgic memories of\t\t Tasmania. The three narratives "intrigue, Melville, Tasmania "prove so\t\t different, however, that recurring themes of loss and abandonment fail to tie\t\t them together.
