Nell Freudenberger (https://nellfreudenberger.net/about/) is a young novelist from New York, living in Brooklyn. Her fiction has been receiving much praise recently. You may wish to see if the Lanark cognoscenti think it’s justified.
Her 2019 novel Lost and Wanted is a thoughtful and entertaining tale about friendship, and the forces which both bind and divide human beings. The summary is as follows.
Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn’t believe in pseudo-science, or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn’t spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days previously. When her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts. Through the grief of the husband and daughter she left behind, Helen is drawn into the orbit of Charlie’s world, slotting in the missing pieces of her friend’s life. And, as she delves into the web of their shared past, Helen finds herself entangled in the forgotten threads of her own life.
Check if this entertaining recent fiction is in stock at your local library by consulting the online catalogue here at https://www.sllclibrary.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/OPAC/BSEARCH
432 pages in Viking Press
First published May 2019
ISBN-13: 978-0241374535
