Lost: A Novel

A first novel hailed as Germany's most exciting fiction debut of last year, Lost walks us into what we think is familiar territory and then suddenly turns all our expectations upside down.

An ordinary German family flees from the advancing Russian army in 1945, makes it to safety, and starts over, painstakingly building a new life in the postwar economic miracle. But in the refugee trek west there was a victim, and that victim was their firstborn son, Arnold.

"Arnold isn't dead. He didn't starve, either," is what the little brother, the narrator of this story, is finally told by his parents when he is about eight years old. "I was only just beginning to understand that Arnold, my un-dead brother, had the leading role in the family, and had assigned me a supporting part." The search is on. Finding lost Arnold is his parents' dream. It is the little brother's nightmare.

Laconically distanced, often darkly and wickedly funny, Lost is the psychological and emotional roller coaster that follows, as seen through the eyes of the youngest and most subversive person in the novel. It is a brilliant debut.