The Land Where Lost Things Go

The Land Where Lost Things Go, (novel)

(Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990).

Olive Watson is an out-of-print writer of children’s stories. In 1975, as an old woman, she sits down to write the first and only draft of her last work, The Land Where Lost Things Go.  At the same time, she uses her notebook as a diary and a place to record her memories. As a result, we encounter three versions of the same person: a little girl living with her family in Cornwall before the first world war, a fictional child wandering through a landscape of witches and trolls, and an old lady who spies on the milkman, battles with her kitchen, and confronts her last living relative, who comes out of the lost world she has been exploring to claim her.

“Impressive and moving . . . all the hallmarks of a Francis novel: the logical illogicality; the wealth of startling images; and comic exuberance laced with the macabre” (T.L.S.)