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An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read
by Stuart Kelly
In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, it’s sobering to realize that some of the world’s greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry, and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part exposé, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literature’s what-ifs and never-weres.
In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century.
Whether destroyed (Socrates’ versions of Aesop’s Fables), misplaced (Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine was pinched from his publisher’s car), interrupted by the author’s death (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston), or simply never begun (Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, America, a second volume of his memoirs), these missing links create a history of literature for a parallel world. Civilized and satirical, erudite yet accessible, The Book of Lost Books is itself a find.
"Never let it be said that there are too many books in the world when so many great ones got away – all those books we don’t have because they were variously left on trains, burned, lost, neglected, abandoned, unstarted, or cruelly cut short by the author’s demise. After reading Stuart Kelly’s clever and enjoyable book, you will feel positively grateful that any survived at all." –Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
"Inevitably, the thesis is more charming than the lengthy execution, and one suspects this would have been much more effective in condensed form as a whimsical article in Harper's or the Atlantic." - PW.
This information about The Book of Lost Books was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stuart Kelly was raised in the Scottish Borders and studied English at Balliol College Oxford, gaining a first class degree and a Master of Studies. He is the Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday and a freelance critic and writer.
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