Lost Property

Description

In the middle of her life, a writer finds herself in a dark wood, despairing and uncomprehending at how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her species, she and her lover rent a busted-out van and journey across France to the Mediterranean, across Italy to the Balkans and Greece and on to the islands. Along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the wars with the Huguenots, the fragility of the Italian Renaissance, the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current refugee crisis, meeting figures from Europe's political and artistic past - a Norman knight, Joan of Arc, Ariosto, D'Annunzio and Alan Moore's nihilistic Rorschach, each lending their own view of humanity at its best and at its very worst.

Laura Beatty is the author of Pollard, a novel that won the Authors' Club First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. She has also written two biographies, the first about Lillie Langtry which contained the first publication of correspondence between Lillie and her lover Arthur Jones, and the second about Anne Boleyn.

Fascinating and eloquent discussion of nationalism, art and conflict, leavened with wry humour. * Mail on Sunday * Lost Property is a phantasmagorical odyssey, a time-travelling reanimation of the past as full-blooded as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, a free-booting upheaval of all the culture, history and landscape between us and the Bosphorus... Made luminous with an extraordinary descriptive brilliance, what is learned through this magical, shapeshifting narrative is the preciousness not of conviction but of uncertainty, if it is shared as part of our common humanity. * Guardian * A phantasmagorical odyssey, a time-travelling reanimation of the past as full-blooded as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. * Guardian * Clever, brave and urgent. I thought about Lost Property for days after I finished it. * Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall * A timely trip through some reminders from history. * i * A meditation on what was and what might be again. * The Oldie * A fierce and wonderful book ... This is just the sort of generous, provocative novel the Booker judges should cherish. * Olivia Laing, Observer, on POLLARD * A novel that heralds an exceptional talent * Guardian, on POLLARD * Enchanting...Beatty is a writer of extraordinary power...alive to every nuance of behaviour * Literary Review, on POLLARD * Beatty makes you feel the layers of history existing alongside the present, so that the stories blend seamlessly... Beautifully written * The Times, on DARKLING * A novel of masterly understatement * Spectator, on DARKLING *