Once upon a time… there was an awardwinning, bestselling Irish crime writer who stepped over the borderland between real and imaginary misdoings and entered the land of fairytales. The author’s name is John Connolly and in 2006 he published the story of a troubled child’s terrifying excursion into the realms of fairytale. Peculiar, perverse and humane, The Book of Lost Things garnered a cult following and sold more than half a million copies. But it was a one-off. A standalone. A strange, weird, unforgettable, never-to-berepeated tale.
Until now. 17 years after that first book, John has re-entered the territory of The Book of Lost Things and emerged with The Land of Lost Things. It tells the story of Ceres, a mother so determined not to yield her comatose daughter to death that she breaks into the fictional underworld of folklore and mythology that she read with her father as a child.
How did this second excursion into the worlds of Lost Things come about?
‘I do occasionally write short stories,’ says John. ‘And I found myself two or three times writing stories set in that universe. I had scripts – the first book has been under option forever and so every now and then I’d have a
