The Book of Lost Hours

Lisavet Levy is eleven when she becomes trapped in the time space, a vast library where the memories of people who lived through history are bound into books. Special watches are the only way in. The year is 1938, and she waits there for her father, a watchmaker, to come back for her.

She grows up among the stacks until 1949. Along the way she discovers government agents destroying volumes so that their own version of the past will stand. In answer, Lisavet begins recording memories in a book of her own, and her path eventually crosses that of an American agent, Ernest Duquesne.

The second timeline opens in 1965. Amelia Duquesne, sixteen, is grieving the disappearance of her uncle Ernest when a CIA agent recruits her. His task is to find the same book of memories that Ernest once hunted. Once Amelia enters the time space herself, she begins to see that the past, and the truth, do not run in a straight line.

The novel blends historical fiction with magical realism and moves between its two timelines. Its atmosphere is dreamlike, and its subject is authoritarian control over history. Two women a generation apart must decide what they will risk to protect the people and truths they love, and Amelia learns how closely her own story is tied to Ernest's and Lisavet's.