Lost and Wanted

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Listen to a sample

What to expect

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger, read by
Anne Marie Lee.

Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn't believe in pseudo-science, or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn't spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days ago.

Then when her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts.

Through the grief of the husband and daughter she left behind, Helen is drawn into the orbit of Charlie's world, slotting in the missing pieces of her friend's past. And, as she delves into the web of their shared history, Helen finds herself entangled in the forgotten threads of her own life.

Lost and Wanted is a searing novel from one of America's most exciting writers about the sacred knottiness of female friendship, the forces which fuse us together and those which drive us apart.

Critics Review

  • Endlessly rich . . . It is Freudenberger’s willingness to accept human contradictions here – and to lay them out with a combination of calm rigour and rueful comedy – that so triumphantly makes Lost and Wanted the real thing

    The Times
  • Dazzling . . .[Freudenberger explores] the nature of ambition, success and grief . . . brilliant

    Financial Times
  • Freudenberger has a real eye for the subtle differences in how people react to adversity, an ear for the way children talk, and an artist’s clear-sighted commitment to seeing the totality of her characters

    Sunday Times
  • The effect is beautiful . . . Reading it, I was moved by intimacies near and far, real and imagined, lost and found in all the echoing corners of the expanding universe

    New York Times
  • This spooky mystery fuses nimbly explained science with a finely calibrated meditation on grief and paths not taken

    Mail on Sunday
  • Tender, sharply observed and marvellously rich

    Daily Mail

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