The Book of Lost Books is a book of stories involving kings, heretics, untimely interruptions and back room deals, falling tortoises and fairy princesses, train crashes and war atrocities, bravery, cowardice, rent boys, chamber maids, love, quests, puzzles and a crocodile. From Homer to Jane Austen, Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, this is an endlessly engaging tour of literature from the pre-historic to Marvel Comics. With academic shaggy dog stories, swashbuckling historical fables, wry ironies and imaginative fantasia, The Book of Lost Books is the perfect read for all bibliophiles. Hilarious, insightful, endlessly fascinating, sometimes shocking – The Book of Lost Books is a wonderfully quirky but utterly romantic saga of our love affair with books.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘A fascinating anthology of writings, which will be quite new to most people and certainly deserve to be preserved’ — Muriel Spark
‘Tantalising, entertaining, mysterious’ —
Herald
A formidable piece of bibliographical belletrism fascinating —
Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times
Charming and erudite book, with its wealth of mini-essays ranging across world literature —
Sunday Telegraph
Charming and erudite —
Sunday Telegraph
Erudite and entertaining marvellous —
London Review of Books
Excellent . . . A formidable piece of bibliographical belletrism —
Sunday Times
Kelly s narrative moves with the ease of an after-dinner conversation . . . carrying itself with an elegance worthy of its subject —
Times
Lively and diverting . . . Kelly has an engaging enthusiasm for the curiosities of literature —
Spectator
Lively and diverting —
Spectator
About the Author
Stuart Kelly has been investigating lost books since he was 15. He studied English at Oxford and is currently a literary critic at The Scotsman on Sunday. He has written for McSweeneys, Poetry Review and Nerve and published his first collection of poems coming in 2004. He lives in Edinburgh.
The three scrapbooks of [Jane Austen s] bagatelles have also been published In these remnants and patches we glimpse a radically different author to the whalebone-corseted, elegantly quadrill ing stereotype so beloved by television adaptors .Instead of wit, we have black comedy; instead of manners, mayhem. Austen s History of England of 1791, “by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian”, is a little comic masterpiece which displays an assured feel for irony, a talent for understatement and a very writerly capacity to simultaneously postulate and subvert. Of the Earl of Essex she says:
“He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that He should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.”
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