The Book of Lost Books
An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read
by Stuart Kelly
£8.99
in stock
Buy E-bookReviews
Clever and highly entertaining ... recall[s] John Aubrey's gossipy 'Brief Lives' and Lytton Strachey's 'Eminent Victorians' ... a many-splendored thing'
The New York Times
Lively and diverting
The Spectator
A fascinating anthology of writings, which will be quite new to most people and certainly deserve to be preserved
Muriel Spark
About the Book
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 account of books destroyed, misplaced, never finished, or never even begun. 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.
The Author
Stuart Kelly
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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