The Lost Child

A gripping and inventive reimagining of Wuthering Heights, by award-winning author Caryl Phillips

In the tradition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Caryl Phillips revisits Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights as a lyrical tale of orphans and outcasts, absence and hope. A sweeping novel spanning generations,The Lost Child tells the story of young Heathcliff’s life before Mr. Earnshaw brought him home to his family; the Bronte sisters and their wayward brother, Branwell; Monica, whose father forces her to choose between her family and the foreigner she loves; and a boy’s disappearance into the wildness of the moors and the brother he leaves behind.

Phillips deftly spins these disparate lives—bound by the past and struggling to liberate themselves from it—into a stunning literary work. Phillips has been called “in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul” (Donna Seaman,Booklist), and his work is charged with the complexities of migration, alienation, and displacement. Haunting and heartbreaking,The Lost Child transforms a classic into a profound story that is singularly its own.