Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2019
336 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An emotionally engaging, suspenseful new novel from the best-selling author, told in the voice of a renowned physicist: an exploration of female friendship, romantic love, and parenthood - bonds that show their power in surprising ways.
Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms. Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.
That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard. The two women had once confided in each other about everything - in college, the unwanted advances Charlie received from a star literature professor; after graduation, Helen's struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie's as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents. But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she's permanently, tragically gone.
As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, and also into the web of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal - a former college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of a Nobel Prize-winning discovery - she is forced to question the laws of the universe that had always steadied her mind and heart.
Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives.
"Starred and Boxed Review. [A] stunning portrayal of grief…[This] story is about grief not only at the loss of [a] friend but also at the demise of countless possible futures. A beautiful and moving novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Compelling, seductively poetic; deeply involving, suspenseful and psychologically lush...With daring, zest, insight, wit, and compassion, Lost and Wanted gracefully and thrillingly bridges the divide between science and art." - Booklist
"Starred Review. Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos...The title is a line from a poem by W.H. Auden, which doesn't fully hit until the end of the book, when it takes on heart-rending poignancy." - Kirkus
"Freudenberger's brilliant and compassionate novel takes on the big questions of the universe and proves, again, that she is one of America's greatest writers." - Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
"Lost and Wanted is a new kind of mystery novel, written with an artist's rigor and a scientist's intuition. Nell Freudenberger shines her light into the farthest reaches of the universe, and also into the whirring spaces between parents and children, lost loves, and best friends. A beautiful book." - Karen Russell
"This tender, engaging story takes a physicist for its heroine, and boldly bends the forces of the universe to the binding love between friends, between partners, between parents and their children. It's not sci-fi, but something we might call fi-sci - a literary and emotional adventure peopled by complex, sympathetic characters, some of whom happen to do science as they navigate their most important relationships." - Dava Sobel
"Intellectually dazzling and almost unbearably moving...I've read many novels that made me think and some that made me cry, but few that did both as powerfully as this one did." - Amy Waldman, author of The Submission
"Gorgeous, brainy, and passionate...Nell Freudenberger's writing is fearless and profound, as it absolutely must be in order to pull off this very modern ghost story that unfolds in the life of an MIT physicist. Freudenberger is one of our best novelists, and she's delivered a real powerhouse of a novel." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
"Like the finely calibrated tools of particle physics described in its pages, Nell Freudenberger's novel demonstrates an astonishing sensitivity to the forces that move us all. Her rendering of grief - with its shadings of denial, anger, longing, dark humor, and magic - is nothing short of perfection." - Julie Orringer, author of The Invisible Bridge
"Before the full scope of the accomplishment has sunk in - the lucid, compassionate portraits of a wide array of characters, the meticulous hand with which Freudenberger paints their world - you'll be beguiled, as I was, by Helen's narration, so full of humble longing and deep, sweet ruefulness." - Jonathan Lethem, author of A Gambler's Anatomy and Motherless Brooklyn
"An iridescent story of friendship. Lost and Wanted is an extraordinary book, startling in its open curiosity and love." - Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors and American Innovations
"Remarkable - a lucid, humane and wryly comic view of the way we live today. One reads the novel with pleasure and marvels at Freudenberger's courage and intelligence. A great work of art." - David Bezmozgis, author of The Betrayers and The Free World
This information about Lost and Wanted was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Jacobs
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds, and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York, NY.
Name Pronunciation
Nell Freudenberger: FROY-den-burger
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