This is a beautifully articulate and poignant novel, at times it maintains a discreet solitary distance from its own moving story, ensuring that as moments of realisation steal into your consciousness and understanding flows into your heart… they stay with you. The author spirals through time, teases history and suggests new beginnings. The story branches three ways, breathtakingly different, remote yet entwined, flowing together and unfurling heartbreaking moments of perception and compassion. The isolation of the characters is shocking, they do not encourage affection or intimacy, their story isn't neat, tidy, clean or explained, you are instead left to observe, to recognise and so find yourself jolted and shaken into awareness, sorrow and regret and yet somehow a fluttering of hope steals across the pages for a story yet untold.
’Wuthering Heights’ and the Bronte family are intrinsically linked to this story, if you haven't yet met Emily, Charlotte and Anne, your journey through ’The Lost Child’ will potentially introduce you to some new companions. ~ Liz Robinson
Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Bronte's Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights and one of literature's most enigmatic lost boys. Written in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, The Lost Child is a multifaceted, deeply original response to Emily Bronte's masterpiece. A critically acclaimed and sublimely talented storyteller, Phillips recovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by transforming a classic into a profound story that is singularly its own.
Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including Dancing in the Dark, Colour Me English, Crossing the River, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and A Distant Shore, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
