The Book of Lost Hours

The Book of Lost Hours is Hayley Gelfuso's debut novel, a genre-blending story of historical fiction and magical realism told across two timelines. Between 1938 and 1949, eleven-year-old Lisavet Levy becomes trapped in "the time space" — a soaring library where the memories of those who lived through history are bound into books, reachable only by special watches. Waiting for her watchmaker father to return, Lisavet grows up among the stacks, and when she discovers government agents destroying volumes to enforce their own version of the past, she starts recording memories in a book of her own, eventually crossing paths with American agent Ernest Duquesne.

In 1965, sixteen-year-old Amelia Duquesne is mourning her uncle Ernest's disappearance when a CIA agent recruits her to find the same book of memories he once sought. Entering the time space herself, Amelia comes to realize that the past — and the truth — are far less linear than she had believed, and that Ernest's and Lisavet's stories are more entangled with her own than she knew.

Selected as a "GMA" Book Club pick, the novel has since been published in more than twenty countries. It pairs a lyrical, atmospheric telling of authoritarianism and historical erasure with an intimate story of two women, a generation apart, deciding what they are willing to risk to protect the people and truths they love.