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    The Book of Lost Things
    The Book of Lost Things
    The Book of Lost Things
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Book of Lost Things

    Written by John Connolly

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the loss of his mother. He is angry and he is alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother he finds that the real world and the fantasy world have begun to meld. The Crooked Man has come, with his mocking smile and his enigmatic words: "Welcome, your majesty. All hail the new king." With echoes of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, author John Connolly introduces us to a cast of not-quite-familiar characters. Like the seven socialist dwarfs who poison an uninvited (and unpleasant) princess and try to peg the crime on her stepmother. Or the Loups, the evil human-canine hybrids spawned long ago by the union of a wolf and a seductive girl in a red cloak. As war rages across Europe, David is violently propelled into a land that is both a construct of his imagination yet frighteningly real, a strange reflection of his own world composed of myths and stories, populated by wolves and worse-than-wolves, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a legendary book.The Book of Lost Things.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 23, 2008
    ISBN9781436101165
    The Book of Lost Things
    Author

    John Connolly

    John Connolly is the author of the #1 internationally bestselling Charlie Parker thrillers series, the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers, and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks.

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    Reviews for The Book of Lost Things

    4.5/5

    268 ratings182 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is brilliant! Made me fall in love with modern day fairy tales. This was the first book of Connolly's that I read and it inspired me to seek out more of his work. Right up there with Gaiman in story-telling. A must-read!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I really want this to list as 4.5 stars. I really, really liked it. It's very dark, more in keeping with the original stories told by the Brothers Grimm, but maybe that's what makes the ending so satisfying.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The Book of Lost Things is basically a fairy tale that pays homage to other fairy tales; the main character David disappears into a magic land after a German bomber plane crashes into his backyard and experiences a multitude of events culled from the books he's read (including, in the book's funniest scene, a book about Communism).It's a story with many layers and an ambiguous end, which makes it a shame that the last 130 pages of the book are the author's notes and thoughts about the story. Even though at times he says things like, "But that's not the only view to take of that scene," he almost ruins the depth of the book by talking about it too much. I really appreciated that he explained all of the fairy tales that he referenced and provided their original texts - some of them were obscure and I'd never heard of them before. But for him to then analyze why he chose each one and what its elements meant to David, that was just too much. The story stands up perfectly well without him explaining himself, and his readers are surely intelligent enough to make the connections themselves.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      "Its voice was deep and low, and filled with spittle and growls, but David could clearly understand every word that it said."'I see you have been busy, Woodsman,' it said. 'You have been fortifying your lair.'"'The woods are changing,' the Woodsman replied. 'There are strange creatures abroad.'"David is a boy who seeks solace in books after the death of his mother. Soon his (our) world gets entangled with that of the stories he reads, and he finds himself trapped in a land where creatures out of fairy tales walk and talk -- and fight. Can he survive in this world, where evil is spreading and nothing is quite as he expects? And can he come to terms with his mother's death, and his father's ongoing life?This is a rather charming book about a boy's coming of age. Connolly takes well-known fairy tales, gives their elements unusual twists, and entangles them carefully with the emotional issues facing his protagonist. The writing is clear and clever, and the pace seldom drags. While the arc of the story is fairly predictable, it's engaging enough to pull you along.One caveat -- the novel ends after 350 pages of this 500-page edition. Infuriatingly, there's no table of contents to indicate this. The rest of the volume consists of various versions of traditional fairy tales that Connolly has used in the book, along with the author's comments. While reading the old tales again was interesting, I am not so convinced by the value of the commentary -- it seemed to me to remove some of the magic from the story.Nevertheless, this remains a good idea, well executed, and worth a read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      if you liked Stephen King's 'Eyes of the Dragon', you will enjoy this.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      David has always loved stories and even during his mother's long illness, stories were the thing that made life tolerable. But now David's mother has died, he and his father have moved out of London to live with the new woman in his father's life, and David is left feeling as though only the stories in his life are reliable anymore. But when the books in his room begin to whisper to him and David finds a portal into a strange land where the stories he knows are alive and living, he finds himself on a quest to find the king and facing the question of whether he ever wants to go home.I really loved this book and the love for stories that breathes from almost every page. David is a fascinating central character and while he is a child, I wouldn't classify the novel as children's or even YA fiction. Fairy tales are the foundation of the other world that David travels to and it is wonderful to see how Connolly builds around them and alters them to make them more resonant for David's own situation. My personal favourite were the communist dwarfs who made me giggle endlessly with their lamenting over their botched assassination attempt of Snow White. A beautiful exploration of the power of stories to help us find our identities as we grow into adulthood, I highly recommend this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      If you enjoy works like Over the Garden Wall or Alice in Wonderland, you'll really appreciate this. Despite being a relatively newer book, it still manages to have a timeless vintage flavor sure to evoke Arthurian legend and Grimme's Fairytales alike.
    • 5/5
      Creative, magical, and dark, this is a wonderful book which brings you into the world of fables where the woods are alive, woodsman come to the rescue, and Little Red Riding Hood gets it on with the Big Bad Wolf. It's a new fairy tale for adults.
    • 3/5
      The Book of Lost Things was a mixed bag. I really liked the concept ("stories come alive with the telling" seemed to be the central theme, as a child is pulled into the world of his collections of fairy tales and myths after his mother dies and father remarries) and the twisted revisions of fairy tales were intriguing, but the narrative just wasn't as successful as it could've been. Connolly started relying on point-of-view shifts to the villains by midway through the book to create tension, which just wound up being clumsy and making the ending far too obvious. I'd still recommend this book to anyone interested in Gregory Maguire-esque fairy tale rewrites, and I'd pick up another Connolly novel myself maybe two or three down the line from this one.
    • 5/5
      I was blown away by The Book of Lost Things - though it seems to have been marketed as a young adult novel (the library copy I read was labeled as "juvenile fiction") it has a great deal of depth, some truly startling horror elements and a beautifully sombre tone. Set in England during World War II, the main character, David, is a twelve-year old boy, grieving for his mother, who died of illness, and struggling to handle his father's remarriage to a woman named Rose, and his new half-brother, the baby Georgie. David is jealous and lonely, and he begins to hear voices whispering from the books in his bedroom - a bedroom that once belonged to a little boy named Jonathan, who disappeared decades earlier. One night, David hears his mother's voice calling to him from the sunken garden and follows her out into the night . . . David stumbles into the world of fairy tales, but the king has lost control of his land and the creatures and stories here are twisted and dark. Wolves are amassing in an army, led by half-man, half-wolf beasts, the products of a union between a human woman in a red cloak and an animal. A huntress creates tortured creatures with the bodies of animals and the heads of children to chase through the wood. A huge underground monster terrorizes a village, and has slaughtered all of the king's men sent to fight it. And through it all, David is being stalked by the Crooked Man, a sinister figure obsessed with children. David finds noble allies in the Woodsman, who guides him in the beginning and sends him on his way to find the king and his "Book of Lost Things," and in Roland, a knight who has set out to learn the fate of his lover, Raphael. Over the course of his journey, David grows and matures. It is a coming-of-age story, and an excellent high fantasy / horror story with a truly disturbing evil in the Crooked Man.
    • 5/5
      It is WW2 in London and bombs threaten David and his family. His mother is seriously ill, and David has developed a set of rituals and rites that he strictly adheres to, in hopes these will keep his mother alive. But the illness takes her, and his father begins to see another woman. When Rose joins the family, David begins to have ?attacks? ? he dreams of horrible things, hears the adventure books he loved to read with his mother whispering to him, sees a Crooked Man in the periphery of his vision. He doesn?t want to tell the psychiatrist about these hallucinations because he doesn?t want to be sent away. After Rose and his father marry, the new family moves to her family?s country estate, where David?s half-brother, Georgie, is born. The resentment and hurt feelings escalate, as do the attacks. Then one night he hears his mother calling him from the garden. Finding a hole in the wall he steps through and finds himself in a completely different land full of danger and threat. The characters are all out of the fairy tales and adventures he?s read, but the stories are much more violent than any he remembers. The Woodsman tells him that the old king has a magical Book of Lost Things which holds the secret to David?s returning to his home. And so they set out to find the king.

      What a magical, wonderful story! I had heard about the book since it was released but the ?fantasy? genre isn?t my usual fare, so I avoided it. I?m sorry it took me so long to come around. This is a quest, an adventure, a fairy tale, a horror story, a coming-of-age story, and a psychological study all in one. I love David, and I loved how Connolly incorporated so many life lessons in this imaginative tale. The adventures David has while in this ?other? land are familiar and yet disturbingly different. For example, a girl in a red cloak tracks the wolf and seduces it.

      Along the way David learns about tolerance, patience, kindness, courage, and compassion. More importantly, he learns the meaning of love and family. He comes to recognize how toxic and dangerous the negative emotions he has been nurturing are (impudence, hatred, rage) and how important the people he has left behind are to him.

      I had pretty much guessed early on that this entire adventure is a figment of David?s imagination, or that it occurs in some sort of fugue state. I realized that the things he feared most were brought to life by his imagination to threaten him in this fantastical world. Still, I really liked how Connolly went about revealing this.

      Connolly is known as a writer of mystery thrillers, and his skill at writing a fast-paced, suspense-filled narrative shows here. I was immediately engaged in the story and couldn?t put it down. I?m going to give this to my teen-aged nephew who is a reluctant reader; I think it will really spark his imagination. It?s a great read for adults and teens alike. There is rather graphic violence, so I would not recommend it to sensitive readers, nor to children under age 12.
    • 4/5
      first line: "Once upon a time -- for that is how all stories should begin -- there was a boy who lost his mother."This novel has a bit of The Stolen Child, Inkheart, and Narnia about it, without being too like any of those. The hero is an obsessive-compulsive boy mourning his dead mother and trying to adjust to life with his father's new family in WWII-era Britain. When he starts to hear his beloved books talking amongst themselves, it's easy to imagine he's suffering from schizophrenic episodes. But then he disappears into an alternate world beyond his garden -- a world of monsters, war, and fairy tales -- and experiences an adventure with themes of courage, love, and sacrifice. (And despite my description, it's not overly saccharine.) I really enjoyed it, though not so much as Connolly's short story collection, Nocturnes.
    • 5/5
      The Book of Lost Things is a difficult story to categorise, but I suppose it's essentially an adult fairy tale. It's written in a straightforward, easy-reading manner - sometimes feeling like it's pitched at a teenage audience - but the subject matter is much darker and suggests that Connolly had adults or mature adolescents in mind when he penned this work.The story follows David, a young boy struggling to cope with the slow death of his mother. Jealous and in pain, he reacts against his father's new relationship with a woman named Rose, and expresses his feelings of hate about the half-brother born to the person he sees as a threat to his relationship with his father. Taking the reader through his feelings of adolescent aggression, grief, loneliness and rejection, he increasingly begins to regress into a fantasy world of books to escape the real world. Then one day, the young boy stumbles fully into a different land, brought there by the mysterious Crooked Man whose motives are initially not clear, but from the beginning have the undercurrent of an ugly and sinister plot.Following David's quest through this alternate world, the book confronts many dark issues aside from the grief of his mother's death and rejection of his new family. It looks at his loneliness as he travels through a strange world, cut off from everything he knows and occasionally reaching the depths of despair; it confronts the fragility of life and how easily it can be taken away, with the story set to the backdrop of World War II in the real world, alongside the other world where torture, pain and murder are commonplace and graphic; and it looks at fear and nightmares, and how we cope and react to them in different ways as we mature.Aside from the darker issues of death and despair, the book delves into adult relationships. Loyalty is a key theme, as David makes allies and forms bonds with those he meets in this strange new world. He comes to rely on others, although is never quite able to trust many of the characters he meets, and soon learns of betrayal. As well as platonic love and loyalty, Connolly looks at sexual relationships. David struggles to grow and comprehend relationships he doesn't initially understand, when he meets a soldier on a quest to find his male lover, and later is confronted with discovering what the love between his father and stepmother means behind closed doors.The book's a real page-turner. It effortlessly mixes an incredibly easy read, almost childlike in places, with a dark and adult subject matter. With references to both reality and fantasy throughout, it is - as the inside cover says - 'a book for every adult who can recall the moment when childhood began to fade, and for every child about to face that moment.' A thrilling read, which I can do nothing other than very highly recommend.
    • 4/5
      Dark, troubling, poignant fairy tale.
    • 5/5
      A coming-of-age tale centered upon young David, who has lost his mother and resents his new stepmother and baby brother. Trying to escape his circumstances, David stumbles into an eerie fairy tale world of knights and beasts much like those in the stories his mother used to recount. David sets out on a quest to find the king, whose Book of Lost Things holds the secret to his return home and, David hopes, perhaps even to his mother?s return to life. Reminiscent at times of Lewis?s Narnia, at others of the Brothers Grimm, The Book of Lost Things will resonate with those who still believe in the magic of childhood.
    • 4/5
      The Book of Lost Things is a fractured fairy tale in the style of "Pan's Labyrinth". Though the story is based on fairy tales (largely The Brother's Grimm), it is not a children's story. The story is about a young boy named David living in WWII era England who can talk to books. After an explosive fight with his stepmother, he finds himself in a story book land (similar to Dorothy going over the rainbow or Alice going through the Looking Glass). The rest of the book is his quest to get to the King and find a way home. Through different trials, David comes to a sort of selfawareness. My only complaint was that the ending came a bit abruptly, as if Connelly had gotten his characters to a particular point and couldn't figure out exactly what to do with them. If you like fairy tales, it's especially fun to see if you can find which fairy tales Connelly has used and how he twisted them (in one version of the paperback, there is an appendix with the stories in their original forms).
    • 5/5
      John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things is a postmodern take on the classic fairy tale. Told through the eyes of David, a 12-year-old boy living in England at the beginning of World War II, it is a scrumptious book that is impossible to put down. After losing his mother to a painful and debilitating illness, David's world seems to be crumbling around him. Not only does his father remarry quickly, but to add insult to injury, they have a baby, usurping the place David thought he should have within his family. Anger and jealousy fester within David, as he longs for things to go back to the way they were. Through an act of desperation, David is transported to an alternate reality, which seems to draw heavily on the fairy tales he grew up with. During his journey through the un-named land, David encounters many strange and frightening beings. Many times, he wishes to be back in his own world with all the problems he had there, but he must conquer this new world in order to be released from it. By making his choice between good and evil, David begins to understand the true nature of love and forgiveness. He begins his journey as a child but ends it as a young man, and "all that was lost was found again." Despite the fact that many of the creatures are shadows from tales of the Brothers Grimm, the story is wholly original in the telling. The Book of Lost Things sparkles with imagination and incredible detail. Connolly cleverly weaves the fabric of his novel around the classic fairy tales we all know and love, but focuses in on the darkness inherent in those tales. The book is well-written and told with the deliberate pace and style of a classic fairy tale. The characters are colorful and twisted versions of their familiar fairy tale counterparts, and the enemies step right out of the recesses of your deepest, darkest nightmares.This is not a story for children (or for the faint of heart for that matter.) The Book of Lost Things is delightfully creepy, and I can't imagine the kind of nightmares it might produce in the child reading it. That being said, it was a truly delicious read, and I loved every minute of it.
    • 5/5
      Everyone has their favorite childhood fairy tales, memories of hearing riveting stories as early as one can remember. And everyone remembers their most haunting childhood nightmare, the dark dreams which kept them awake night after night, afraid to fall asleep for fear of what might be found there. In his exquisitely-written novel, The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly recalls for his readers those childhood feelings and memories - the favored tales and primal fears - and brings them together in a hauntingly bittersweet coming of age story.The book centers around David, a twelve year old boy, who has trouble coping with his mother's death and his father's remarriage. As his life dramatically shifts from what he knew of his childhood to the terrifying unknown of adolescence, David turns to his books and favorite stories for comfort. That is, until the new baby arrives. The definite line between David's imagination and reality begins to blur, and soon David finds himself on an epic journey through the stories he remembers and the fears he does not as he struggles to find himself amongst the convoluted nightmare of his imagination.Connolly, an experienced writer of thriller novels, uses his craft to bring readers into that terrifying point in one's life between childhood and adulthood as he shows David's struggle to navigate the changes in his life. With guest appearances by some classic fairy-tale characters, The Book of Lost Things is an excellent read for anyone who has ever been afraid of growing up.
    • 4/5
      Is it wrong that my reading was severely impeded by the reader's guide at the end of the book?

      The story itself was fine, although it was way too derivative. Reading it, I could almost visualize the pitch meeting, with Connolly explaining that the book would be like the Narnia books and Grimm's fairy tales ... but darker!

      And the added darkness worked. The Book of Lost Things, despite being predictable, was a good read, with an interesting story and a few moments of genius.

      And then there's the reader's guide. I feel stupid harping on this, but Mr. Connolly (or perhaps his publishers) seems to think that his novel was a lot more opaque than it actually was. But his use and alteration of existing stories was not nearly interesting enough to earn him the opportunity to pull back the curtain and demonstrate the inner workings of his plot. There was no curtain.
    • 4/5
      I'd never read John Connolly before and it turns out he's usually writes in the thriller genre. But this tale could be shelved under fantasy. It's the story of a young boy named David who lives in World War II-era London. After losing his mother to an illness, he's not too crazy about the new woman in his father's life and then, whoa, he enters into another realm. This realm is ruled by a mysterious king and overrun with all manner of beasts. And David needs to be particularly wary of the Crooked Man. He goes through a series of adventures that are pretty hair-raising in a dark fairy-tale sort of way. And there's one comic interlude I was chuckling at that involved seven dwarves. Great story.
    • 4/5
      12-year-old David mourns his dead mother, resents his new stepmother and baby half-brother, and suddenly finds that books have begun whispering to him. One night he journeys to a strange land, a land of fairy tales and dreams. But these aren't your modern, Disney-fied fairy tales. These are the old cautionary fables, full of monsters and violence. I spent much of the first part of this book wondering why it hadn't been made into a movie, but once David enters the other land, there is more than a little bit of disturbing, violent imagery. Even so, it's a captivating story, full of classic motifs and new characters, scary monsters and thrilling adventure. Not one I'll soon forget.
    • 5/5
      The part with the dwarves was my favorite! Great story!
    • 5/5
      I picked this book up off the bargain table at Borders for $6 because I was initially drawn to the cover. This story takes place during World War II and begins with the main character, a young boy, who loses his mom to disease. He develops Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as a result, and escapes from life though reading books. One night he climbs through a crack in the garden wall and enters a world of twisted versions of the stories he's read. It's an amazing fairy tale with an incredible ending.
    • 4/5
      A dark, dark fairy story where nasty things happen, but where the power of good thought redeems the main character and his constructed world.
    • 4/5
      Excellent, and moving in it's symplistic style. An interesting twist on fairytales many of us are familiar with. There is a difinite dark feel to the book, but not in a way that is vulgar, disturbing or unecessary.
    • 3/5
      "What is this place?""Are we dead?"The minute I read those lines I thought "LOST"! This is just like LOST. David finds himself in a strange world. There is a lot of surreal things going on. Things out of place, his dead mother calling to him, an unseen beast in the woods. He doesn't know where he ended up when he went through the hole in the stone wall. Another dimension? Is he dreaming? Is he dead? Did he die when the bomber crashed? He doesn't know. We don't know.Roland's answer:"All of these things are real. You have endured pain here. If you can endure pain, then you can die. You can be killed here, and your own world will be lost to you forever. Never forget that. If you do, you are lost."At this point the book got a whole lot more interesting to me. Up until then I was still having a hard time getting into the story. A slow start but strong second half made up for it. Not quite LOST, but still interesting and creepy in its own way.
    • 5/5
      Do you think that people are born with some meanness or do you they develop that as they age? The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly explores the idea of nature vs. nurture through the use of fairy tales. David, a young boy who watches his mother (who?s also his closest friend) die of cancer, has a difficult time coping with his father?s new wife and his new half brother. He misses his mother greatly and in his grief, he becomes selfish and angry. David has always taken comfort in books. It was one of the things he shared with his mother. After his mother?s passing he definitely uses books as an escape. At first he can hear the books whispering to him, then he sees a ?crooked man? in his bedroom. When his relationship with his father hits rock bottom, David finds himself in an alternate world where he?s attacked by wolves who walk on two feet, meets six dwarfs (the seventh has left the group to work at his mother?s bakery), a sleeping princess, and an aged king. In this alternate world, as David has adventure after adventure, he learns what it means to care for other people and the world around him. Using fairy tales and a childlike imagination, Connolly creates one of the most creative coming of age stories I?ve ever read.
    • 5/5
      Oh this was excellent! LOVED IT!!
    • 5/5
      One of my favourite books I've ever read. An excellent character study for young teens and brilliantly written for adults too. This dark fantasy will draw you in and you won't be able to put it down.
    • 5/5
      Themes: Death, War, fairy tales, sibling jealousy, stepfamilies, mothers,Setting: WWII England and the Other WorldIt starts with the death of David's mother. David retreats into a world of books, reading their favorite fairy tales over and over. Then his father remarries and David gets a new stepmother and a baby brother all at the same time. He also moves to a new house, a house with a passage to the Other World. And the Crooked Man is there, beckoning David to enter and search for his lost mother. David steps into the Other World, and finds that it's not so easy to get back home.This creepy little story features some not so pleasant twists on Red Riding Hood, Snow White, werewolves, trolls, harpies, and lots of other nasties. None of the stories are quite the way you would expect, and most of them have a sting in the tail. David remains a great character, a young boy who is almost a man and who is learning to move on with his life.One of the things that bugged me about this book is that all the female characters are rather one-dimensional, until the end. David's mother is a saint, but all the rest are nasty, rapacious, hypersexual or violent or greedy, or even a combination of all three. I'm not sure if that's meant to represent David's rather confused views on womanhood as an adolescent boy whose mother has died and whose stepmother has arrived with her aura of sexuality, or if that is just a part of the world in the story. If it's the first, I can live with it easier than if it's meant to represent a true picture of the Other World. The male characters are not typecast like that.However, there is a lot to like in the book. I would recommend it to older teens and adults. Really good story. 4.5 stars