Lost: A Novel

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wicked comes “a brilliant, perceptive, and deeply moving fable” (Boston Sunday Globe).

Famed children’s book author Winifred Rudge travels to London to research a ghost story about a woman who is being haunted by Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival she finds that her stepcousin John Comestor has mysteriously disappeared, and a ghostly presence has taken over his apartment in the 19th-century rowhouse once owned by Winnie’s great-great-grandfather. Is it the ghost of the grandfather, who family legend claims was Charles Dickens’s childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? The ghost of Jack the Ripper? Or a spirit from a more ancient age? Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of spectres and shades, some from her family’s dim history and some from her own unremembered past.

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 and Oscar 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).