The Luster of Lost Things
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Narrated by:
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Kirby Heyborne
About this listen
A fablelike debut for fans of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove, in which a boy with an uncanny ability to find lost objects must embark on his most important search yet in order to save his mother's enchanted dessert shop, the only place he's ever called home.
There's only one place in the world that lonely 12-year-old Walter Lavender Jr. feels at home: The Lavenders, his mother's unusual West Village dessert shop, where meringues scud through displays like clouds, marzipan dragons breathe actual fire, and the airy angel food cake can make customers pounds lighter.
When the mysterious and magical Book at the heart of the shop vanishes and a landlord threatens closure, it's up to Walter to find the Book and save the shop. Despite - or because of - a communication disorder that renders him speechless and friendless, Walter has a special ability to find lost things. In fact the only thing he's failed to find is his father, a pilot lost in a presumed plane crash at sea before Walter was born.
Accompanied by Milton, his best friend and overweight golden retriever, Walter's quest will take him around and under New York City, into subway tunnels and soaring over Central Park, from bottle collecting in Chinatown to racing through the Met, and introduce him to the extraordinary and forgotten people of this fantastical city. Along the way he will discover his voice and learn what it means to truly be found.
©2017 Sophie Chen Keller (P)2017 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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A Must Read (Listen)
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Critic reviews
“A book of rare elegance.... Keller understands the magic of New York City...and how sometimes listening to those most people hurry past make us find something we did not know we were missing. This book is one of those things: Take the time to find it.” (Newark Star-Ledger)
“[R]ewards those willing to savor the linguistic riches and quirky characters, artfully provided by the author. With its strong story line and magic realism, this will appeal to readers of Joanne Harris’ Chocolat and the works of Alice Hoffman.” (Booklist)
“A buoyant, surprising, deeply human novel that underscores how easy it is to become lost in this great big world, and how affecting it is to be found. It's no small bit of irony that I completely lost myself in these pages. The Luster of Lost Things is every bit as delicious as the magical treats from the family bakery at the heart of this charming debut.” (Steven Rowley, author of Lily and the Octopus)
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Story
Named a New York Times notable book of 1994, The Iron Dragon's Daughter tells the heartrending story of a changeling child who is kidnapped to a realm of malls and machines and enslaved in a vast, infernal factory. Ultimately, she escapes and attempts to educate herself about this alien world, while being tormented by visions of the life she was denied.
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Inconsistent story and makes for a poor experience
- By Martin Smith on 07-10-15
By: Michael Swanwick
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Liesl & Po
- By: Kei Acedera, Lauren Oliver
- Narrated by: Jim Dale
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Liesl lives in a tiny attic bedroom, locked away by her cruel stepmother. Her only friends are the shadows and the mice - until one night a ghost appears from the darkness. It is Po, who comes from the Other Side. Both Liesl and Po are lonely, but together they are less alone. That same night, an alchemist's apprentice, Will, bungles an important delivery. He accidentally switches a box containing the most powerful magic in the world with one containing something decidedly less remarkable. Will's mistake has tremendous consequences for Liesl and Po....
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Great story made better by a great narrator
- By Marie on 09-16-12
By: Kei Acedera, and others
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Fishbowl
- A Novel
- By: Bradley Somer
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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A goldfish named Ian is falling from the 27th-floor balcony on which his fishbowl sits. He's longed for adventure, so when the opportunity arises, he escapes from his bowl, clears the balcony railing and finds himself airborne. Plummeting toward the street below, Ian witnesses the lives of the Seville on Roxy residents.
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Book so good, it'll make you want to slap yo momma
- By Fabrikator on 07-26-16
By: Bradley Somer
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The Clockwork Three
- By: Matthew Kirby
- Narrated by: Marc Thompson
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A team of unlikely friends - an orphaned street musician, a hard-working girl from the tenements, and a talented clockmaker's apprentice - discover that together they can overcome even the darkest of fears.
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HASTY CLIMBERS SUFFER SUDDEN FALLS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-17-17
By: Matthew Kirby
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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Something More Than Night
- By: Ian Tregillis
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Ian Tregillis's Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas’s vision of Heaven. It’s a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.
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part noir mystery, part philosophy class
- By Alison on 04-14-14
By: Ian Tregillis
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The Green Bicycle
- By: Haifaa Al Mansour
- Narrated by: Ariana Delawari
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Spunky 11-year-old Wadjda lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with her parents. She desperately wants a bicycle so that she can race her friend Abdullah, even though it is considered improper for girls to ride bikes. Wadjda earns money for her dream bike by selling homemade bracelets and mixtapes of banned music to her classmates. But after she's caught, she's forced to turn over a new leaf (sort of), or risk expulsion from school. Still, Wadjda keeps scheming, and with the bicycle so closely in her sights, she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
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Amazing story
- By Amazon Customer on 01-28-23
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Bone Gap
- By: Laura Ruby
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Bone Gap is the story of Roza, a beautiful girl who is taken from a quiet Midwestern town and imprisoned by a mysterious man, and Finn, the only witness, who cannot forgive himself for being unable to identify her kidnapper. As we follow them through their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, and their uncertain futures, acclaimed author Laura Ruby weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, magic and mystery, regret and forgiveness.
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Beauty is In the Eye of the Beholder
- By FanB14 on 11-23-15
By: Laura Ruby
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The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
- By: Hannah Tinti
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past - a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.
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Odd choice for narrator
- By lindsey b. on 01-23-19
By: Hannah Tinti
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The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
- By: Tiffany Baker
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Truly Plaice, an overly large and ungainly girl, is the polar opposite of her sister, Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. With their parents dead, Truly and Serena Jane are separated: Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation.
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meh...
- By Victoria on 02-25-09
By: Tiffany Baker
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Fruit of the Drunken Tree
- A Novel
- By: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.
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Maybe better to read this book than listen???
- By Amazon Customer on 12-12-18
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Church of Marvels
- A Novel
- By: Leslie Parry
- Narrated by: Denice Stradling
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.
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If Dickens needed a NY location for a story..
- By Sandi from Oregon on 05-13-15
By: Leslie Parry
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Normal
- By: Graeme Cameron
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving you into the lane ahead of him. What you don't know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he's carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he's holding there against her will - one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her.
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Twisted
- By Richelle Reid on 04-03-15
By: Graeme Cameron
What listeners say about The Luster of Lost Things
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lada
- 08-21-17
a jubilant story about human connection
If, like me, you are desperately seeking a sweet escape from the appalling, unpredictable, scary place our world is fast deteriorating into, look no further: you have found your story. Young Walter Lavender, with his trusty retriever companion, Milton, is on a quest to find a lost treasure. Overcoming his fears and a speech impediment, he journeys through and beneath the streets of NYC connecting with memorable characters along the way. Though this is a contemporary novel, there is a timelessness to this tale which lends it a fable-like quality. Keller's luscious descriptions lean towards the fantastical (especially when describing the sweet treats to be found in Lucy Lavender's shop) but feel like they could germinate from any 12-year old's imagination. Make no mistake though, this is a tale for adults to savor and is so much more than the fantasy it is being marketed as. The true magic in this book is the joy it engenders as Walter comes out of his shell, makes unexpected friends and discovers how small acts of kindness can change a life, especially his own.
Kirby Heyborne breathes life into Walter and the other characters with pitch perfect narration. I think this would be an enjoyable book to read but I'm glad I listened instead. In fact, I actually discovered this audiobook through my local library and when I was done and realized Audible had no reviews yet, I bought the book which I know I'll enjoy re-listening to so I could encourage fellow audiophiles to take a listen and hopefully bring this novel to the attention of Audible editors so they might highlight it and help others find this treasure.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Kris Hall
- 08-25-22
Delicate and Beautiful Story of Loss and Love
This book is a journey, the hero's journey, of a young man and all those who enter his world as he finds his path and spreads kindness.
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- John Matthew Walker
- 06-25-24
Keller is a literary wizard
Lustrous descriptions aren’t for everyone, but if you love a perfect blend of story and prose, you’ve found it. Keller brings Walter Lavender into your heart. A young boy who’s lost so much but has never lost hope finds himself on a quest to find more than he realized he had lost. Beautiful story. Thank you, Sophie, for sharing you heart and your whimsical genius.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-13-18
Some magical, meaningful sections
I loved the beginning chapters of this book, but the story gets bogged down and tedious midway through. There is some kind-hearted wisdom dispersed in the pages, but the plot is contrived.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-28-24
As satisfying as browned butter.
Loved the world built right under our feet and the characters who I want to be friends.
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- Cathy Caudill
- 07-27-23
Great narration of a touching story
Very well written story of a boy and the challenges he faces in life. Narrator did an excellent job of bringing the characters to life.
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- Carlos Benjamin
- 06-25-24
A Sprinkle of Magic on a Tale of Discovery
I couldn’t help rooting for Walter as he goes in search of his own “lost” item and discovering much more along the way.
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- Keith Crigler
- 06-13-24
Thank you!
This was an amazingly unique story that I didn't realize I needed to hear until after I had listened to it.
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- Carly Oeller
- 01-27-19
A delightful and delicious read
Impeccable. Stellar vocal performance, and riveting modern twist on the coming-of-age genre. Would happily re-read.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Susan
- 09-30-17
good book to read
It is a good book. Both my son and me enjoy reading it. it is worth to buy it .
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