The Book of Lost Things

This is one of my favorite books ever. It was hard for me to get into it, but after the first thirty pages the story really came alive and sucked me in. It has a great twist to some classic fairy tales.

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the loss of his mother. He is angry and he is alone, with only the books on his shelf for company.

But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother he finds that the real world and the fantasy world have begun to meld. The Crooked Man has come, with his mocking smile and his enigmatic words: 'Welcome, your majesty. All hail the new king.'

And as war rages across Europe, David is violently propelled into a land that is both a construct of his imagination yet frighteningly real, a strange reflection of his own world composed of myths and stories populated by wolves and worse-than-wolves, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a legendary book . . . The Book of Lost Things.