The Book of Lost Hours is the imaginative debut novel of Hayley Gelfuso. I am quite impressed by this debut and will definitely be keeping an eye out for what Gelfuso writes next.

The Book of Lost Hours imagines time as this vast, infinite space on a different plane of existence that is full of books that contain the memories of everyone who has ever lived. This time space can only be accessed by special watches that used to be passed down through the watchmaker’s family. Eleven-year-old Lisavet Levy’s father is one of these watchmakers. On Kristallnacht, knowing the Nazis are after him for his special watches, Lisavet’s father hides her in the time space, promising to return for her, but he never does. Lisavet grows up alone in the time space with the specters of human memories as her only companions. She doesn’t need to sleep, eat or even pass bowel moments. She experiences the world through the memories of the people who lived before her. She follows the Nazis around the time space and watches as they burn books to erase the people whose memories are contained in the books from history, including her own father. She tries to save as many scraps of these burned books as she can in her own book of memories.

By 1949, the Nazis have been replaced by agents of other governments from around the world who are still burning books in order to preserve their respective countries’ interests. Lisavet meets an American agent named Ernest Duquesne, which essentially puts a target on her back as her book of memories becomes a prize that Ernest’s government wants to get its hands on.

In 1965, sixteen-year-old Amelia Duquesne is mourning her uncle Ernest, who has died under suspicious circumstances. She is approached by a mysterious woman named Moira who works for the CIA. Moira reveals the secret of the time space to Amelia because she wants Amelia to use her uncle Ernest’s watch to access the time space and find Lisavet’s book of memories.

Despite its sometimes-questionable plotting and predictability, The Book of Lost Hours is an entertaining story that I felt compelled to zip through. Lisavet becomes this heroic master manipulator of time as she is physically changed by inhabiting the time space for so long. Amelia is initially an annoying-ass teenager, but she turns out to be a lot more level-headed than teenagers usually are. Moira is this inscrutable and acerbic character that you are not sure how to feel about, until you learn more about her relationship with Jack Dillinger, her boss at the CIA, a swarmy and manipulative man who is obsessed with power and the Communists.

But what I like best about The Book of Lost Hours is its representation of the influence of political ideology on history. The story is set primarily during the Cold War, so you have these competing ideologies, democracy (or at least the American version of it) and communism (or at least the Russian version of it), and American and Russian agents running around the time space burning books that they feel are a threat to their respective ideologies. Lisavet seems to be the lone voice of reason as she questions how anyone can think they have the right to change history, and she is seen as a terrorist for trying to preserve the truth. History has always been written by the victors, but it is especially important now than ever, with AI and access to knowledge being concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires, that we preserve a complete picture of our history.