In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer’s search for the truth behind his family’s tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.

The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives’ fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents, and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family’s story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.

Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

THE LOST:

A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, WINNER

NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD, WINNER

SALON BOOK AWARD, WINNER

PRIX MÉDICIS (France), WINNER

PREMIO WIZO-ADEI (Italy), WINNER

LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, FINALIST

DUFF COOPER PRIZE (U.K.), FINALIST

BARNES & NOBLE “DISCOVER” PRIZE, 2ND PLACE

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

AMAZON BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2006

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER (FRANCE, ITALY, ISRAEL, NORWAY)

Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. In February, 2019 he was named Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and the Director of the Robert B Silvers Foundation.

Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his Ph.D. he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, particularly The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He has also been a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic.

His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; two collections of essays; a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays (2002), and a two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), which included the first English translation of the poet’s “Unfinished Poems.” His third collection of essays, Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, will be published in October 2019.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s honors include the PEN Harry Vursell Prize for Prose Style, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and Princeton University’s James Madison Medal. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, he teaches literature at Bard College.