John Connolly is best known for crime novels about a haunted private detective called Charlie Parker. In 2006 he published something else: a fairy tale for adults about a grieving boy, a crooked man and a land built from the stories the boy has read. The Book of Lost Things has been quietly passed from reader to reader ever since, and it is one of those books people describe as the one that “got them back into reading”.
This guide is spoiler-light until the section marked Spoilers. Read the top half if you are deciding whether to start it, and the rest once you have finished.
What it is about
David is twelve. It is the early years of the Second World War, and his mother has died after a long illness. His father remarries quickly, the family leaves London for his stepmother Rose’s big old house in the country, and soon there is a new baby, Georgie. David is angry, lonely and frightened, and he starts to hear the books on his shelves whispering to each other.
Then he begins to see a figure in the house: a thin, crooked man who seems to know everything about him. One night, chasing what he believes is his mother’s voice, David passes through a gap in the wall of the sunken garden and finds himself in another land.
That land is made of the stories David knows, but they have gone wrong. Wolves walk upright and want to become men. A woodsman guides him through forests full of things that hunt children. Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Sleeping Beauty are all there, rearranged into something stranger and darker. David’s only hope of getting home, he is told, is a king who keeps a book called The Book of Lost Things. And the Crooked Man keeps appearing, offering him a bargain.
Who it is for
- Adults who loved fairy tales as children. The book assumes you know the originals, and much of its power comes from seeing them bent.
- Readers of Neil Gaiman and of films like Pan’s Labyrinth: grief, childhood and a monstrous other world that both frightens and heals.
- Older teenagers, with care. David is a child, but this is not a children’s book. There is real violence, some grotesque horror (the Huntress’s chapters especially) and frank treatment of death.
It is a moderate-length novel, around 300 to 500 pages depending on the edition and whether the appendix is included, and Connolly’s prose is plain and clear. It reads quickly, which is part of why it is so often recommended to people who want to fall back into books.
The fairy tales inside it
Connolly’s land is built out of the European fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, filtered through a frightened child’s imagination. Part of the pleasure is spotting them:
- Little Red Riding Hood is the root of the Loups, wolves descended from a girl who wanted to be loved by a wolf. Connolly asks what that story would mean if you took it literally.
- Snow White appears as broad comedy: the seven dwarfs are put-upon workers with very modern opinions, and Snow White herself is not the princess you remember.
- Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Rumpelstiltskin all shape episodes in David’s journey, and the Crooked Man owes a great deal to the last.
- The knight and the quest: Roland, a soldier searching for a lost companion, gives the book its most adult and moving thread.
Many editions include a long appendix in which Connolly reprints the original tales and explains how he used them. It is worth reading after the novel. If you want to know where the monsters come from, our list of fantasy creatures traces many of them back to their folklore.
What makes it work
Three things lift The Book of Lost Things above most dark fairy tales.
It is about grief, honestly. David’s anger at his father and his resentment of Rose and the baby are not softened. The other world is not an escape from those feelings. It is where he has to face them.
The villain is perfectly judged. The Crooked Man is courteous, patient and certain that David will eventually give him what he wants. He is frightening because he understands children: their jealousy, their wish that the new sibling would simply disappear. Our guide on how to write a villain uses him as an example of a villain built around what the hero wants rather than what the villain wants.
It trusts the reader. Connolly does not explain the land. Whether it is real, a fever dream or something between is left open, and the book is stronger for it.
Spoilers: themes and the ending
Stop here if you have not finished the book.
The book is about the moment a child becomes an adult, and about what is lost in that change. The Crooked Man’s bargain is a temptation to stay a child forever, to keep the jealousy and the wish that Georgie had never been born and let someone else act on them. David’s refusal is the turn of the whole novel.
The king turns out to be a boy who came through long before David and made the other choice. Jonathan Tulvey, a relative of Rose’s family, vanished from the house as a child with a little girl called Anna, and the bargain he made with the Crooked Man shaped the land David has been walking through. David is looking at what he could become.
The final chapters, after David comes home, move through the rest of his life at speed: war, love, loss, old age. Many readers find this coda the most moving part of the book. It insists that stories do not end when the adventure does, and that the lost things are not only in the other land.
The sequel: The Land of Lost Things
In 2023 Connolly returned with The Land of Lost Things. It follows Ceres, a single mother whose daughter Phoebe lies in a coma after an accident, and who finds her way into the same world, now changed by time. It can be read on its own, but it is richer if you know the first book, and the two together make a story about parents and children seen from both sides.
12 books like The Book of Lost Things
Fairy tales for grown-ups
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (2013). A man returns to his childhood home and remembers the girl at the end of the lane and the thing that came through when he was seven. The closest match in tone.
- Uprooted, Naomi Novik (2015). A dark fairy-tale forest and a heroine who walks into it. Polish folklore instead of Grimm.
- The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden (2017). Russian winter, household spirits and a girl who can see them. The first of a trilogy.
- Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente (2011). The Russian tale of Koschei the Deathless retold through the Soviet century. More adult and more poetic.
Children who go through
- The Neverending Story, Michael Ende (1979). A lonely boy who has lost his mother steals a book and finds himself inside it. The Book of Lost Things owes it a debt.
- Coraline, Neil Gaiman (2002). A door in a new house leads to a better version of home, run by something that wants to keep her. Short, and terrifying at any age.
- Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (2016). A boarding school for children who came back from other worlds and want to return. Asks what happens after the door closes.
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow (2019). A girl in the early 1900s finds a book about doors to other worlds and begins to suspect it is about her. More on the theme in our essay on impossible doors.
Strange, sad and beautiful
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (2020). A man lives in an endless house of statues and tides and keeps careful journals. Not a fairy tale, but the same sense of a world hiding a wound. See our guide to books like Piranesi.
- Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock (1984). An ancient English woodland where the figures of myth take shape from human memory. Brothers, grief and a forest that goes deeper the further you walk.
- The Hazel Wood, Melissa Albert (2018). A girl’s reclusive grandmother wrote a book of dark fairy tales, and now the stories are coming for her. Young adult.
- A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness (2011), from an idea by Siobhan Dowd. A boy whose mother is dying is visited by a monster who tells him three stories. If the grief in Connolly’s book hit you hardest, read this next.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Book of Lost Things a children’s book? No. It has a child hero and fairy-tale material, but it was written and published for adults. It contains violence and horror that some younger readers will find disturbing. Many readers give it to teenagers from about fifteen.
Is The Book of Lost Things a standalone? Yes. It tells a complete story. The 2023 follow-up, The Land of Lost Things, returns to the same world with a new heroine.
Who is the Crooked Man? He is the book’s villain, a figure who trades in children and bargains. Connolly draws on Rumpelstiltskin and on the nursery rhyme “There was a crooked man”. His true nature is part of the book’s final revelations.
How long is The Book of Lost Things? It varies by edition. The novel itself is a few hundred pages; editions with the appendix of original fairy tales and Connolly’s notes run considerably longer. Most readers finish it in a few sittings.