World history is replete with things that have been lost—unintentionally destroyed or lost to the passage of time. In her book, Judith Szalansky attempts to capture what the lost leaves behind: echoes and faded traces, rumors and legends, signs of oblivion and phantom pains. A painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific Ocean—this inherently incomplete catalogue of the lost and vanished becomes a repository for twelve stories that unleash their narrative power where conventional tradition fails.

The protagonists of these stories are people, or their spirits, struggling with transience: an old man who preserves the knowledge of humanity in his garden in Ticino, an artist of ruins who creates the past as it never was, an aging Greta Garbo who wanders through Manhattan wondering when exactly she might have died, and the writer Judith Schalansky, who traces the history of the GDR in the empty spaces of her own childhood.

This book, winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize and a finalist for the International Booker, has been acclaimed by many critics around the world, as it demonstrates that the difference between presence and absence can be insignificant, as long as memory and literature exist, allowing us to sense how close preservation and destruction, loss and creation are to each other.