ONE CHAPTER CLOSER

The Book of Lost Hours

By Hayley Gelfuso

Simon and Schuster · 2025-08-26

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK! For fans of The Ministry of Time and The Midnight Library, a sweeping, “astounding debut” (Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author) novel following two remarkable women moving between postwar and Cold War-era America and the mysterious time space, a library filled with books containing the memories of those who bore witness to history. One fateful evening, eleven-year-old Lisavet Levy finds herself trapped in the time space—a vast, enchanted library where memories of the dead are bound into books. As she grows up among the stacks, she discovers that government agents are infiltrating and destroying books to maintain their preferred version of history. Determined to salvage what seh can, Lisavet creates her own book of memories...until an American agent, Ernest Duquesne, arrives to stop her, setting off a battle over memory and truth that could change history itself. In 1965, sixteen-year-old Amelia Duquesne is mourning the disappearance of her uncle Ernest when an enigmatic CIA agent seeks her help in tracking down a book of memories her uncle had once sought. But as Amelia visits the time space for the first time, she realizes that the past—and the truth—might not be as linear as she’d like to believe “in this intriguing novel” (Booklist).

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