About the Book

A British writer investigates a woman claiming to be haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper in the eagerly awaited third novel from the acclaimed bestselling author of "Wicked" and "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister". Illustrations.

Book Synopsis

"A brilliant, perceptive, and deeply moving fable."
--Boston Sunday Globe

Publishers Weekly calls Gregory Maguire's Lost "a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story." Brilliantly weaving together the literary threads of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the Jack the Ripper stories, the bestselling author of The Wicked Years canon creates a captivating fairy tale for the modern world. With Lost, Maguire--who re-imagined a darker, more dangerous Oz, and inspired the creation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway blockbuster Wicked--delivers a haunting tale of shadows and phantoms and things going bump in the night, confirming his reputation as "one of contemporary fiction's most assured myth-makers" (Kirkus Reviews).

From the Back Cover

Winifred Rudge, a writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her step-cousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his home. Is the spirit Winnie's great-great-grandfather, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin? Winnie begins to investigate and finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades--some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past.