The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

 

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan tells the story of Anthony Peardew, a man who collects lost items and stores them. When Anthony dies, Laura becomes the owner of these things and becomes tasked with finding their owners. The book is a mixture of the stories of these items, Anthony/Laura's story, and a third plotline involving a book publisher and his assistant who is madly in love with him. I admire Hogan's ability to make it clear exactly what plotline we're in.  She had just a slightly different tone in each storyline and it was easy to keep track of everything.

In particular, the vignettes that were small stories about the items were superb.  In three pages, Hogan was able to create memorable characters and scenes and imbue them with details that I'll be thinking about for a long time to come.  As I was reading it, I was so impressed and wondered what magic Hogan could do with a short story collection.

This was definitely a thumbs up from me. I found everything about this enjoyable, from the intersecting plots to the interesting characters to the dazzling writing.  Hearty recommendation if you didn't read this when it came out five years ago.

Notable lines:

"It's not even well-written excrement. It execrable excrement." (page 227)

"Thick and fast he was losing words like a tree loses leaves in the autumn. A bed might be "a soft sleep square" and a pencil "a stick with gray middle writing coming out." Instead of words, he spoke in clues, or more often now, not at all." (page 246)