The Book of Lost and Found by Lucy Foley - Review

As you may know, I've read the more recent novels by Lucy Foley which are all crime thrillers, and I've enjoyed them, so when I realised she had written a few books before her crime ones I decided to reserve one at the library to see what it was like. I then took this on holiday and it's true that I didn't have much time to read while I was away, but also, I just found this book so overblown and just way too long that it really annoyed me. Every time I thought it was almost about to finish, something else would happen and someone else would have something terrible happen to them. It's just a lot. 

Kate is thirty something and her mother, Jane, has been dead for only about a year, and then Jane's adoptive mother Evelyn has just died too. Jane was a famous dancer and Evelyn sort of adopted her when she was little and got her into dancing. Kate is a photographer. Before she died, Evelyn gave Kate a portrait of a woman by a lake, which is signed with the initials TS. Along with it was a letter from a woman called Celia, saying she was Jane's birth mother and that she wanted to reconcile with her. Evelyn concealed this from Jane and Kate, and is only now coming clean. 

Kate thinks that the artist might be Thomas Stafford, so she starts out by asking his sister, and eventually gets in touch with the elusive artist. She ends up on Corsica at his house, alongside his grandson, Oliver. Oliver is clearly unhappy that she's there, but Stafford wants to tell the story of his life, and his love affair with Alice, who is the person calling herself Celia in the letter. 

His family were on a trip to Cornwall when they met Alice's family, who were aristocracy and had a manor on the beach or whatever. Thomas and Alice were then very small, but they meet later when Thomas is at Oxford, in the 1920s. Alice is clever but not permitted to go to university by her cold and somewhat unloving mother. Thomas and Alice have a strong friendship that eventually turns to an affair, and he did indeed do lots of portraits of her. She ends up in Paris in the thirties, living a bohemian life even as Nazism grows and World War Two sits on the horizon. 

As I say, it's just too long. I'd have liked it to lose two hundred pages and at least a couple of the strands of what happens. Alice leads an interesting life and so does Thomas, but god listening to them both recount their entire lives was just dull. I'm giving this three stars and honestly I think that is a bit generous.