I have just spent a wonderful day reading this extraordinary book, accompanied by beautiful music and by turns laughing out loud and blubbing my eyes out.  It is impossible to read this book and not be profoundly moved.  The characters are so lovingly drawn (except the despicable Portia), but best of all is Sunshine, the “dancing drome”.  Everybody needs a bit of Sunshine in their lives.
The writing is always superb, but really excels when the short vignettes of the memories attached to the “Lost Things” appear.  Anthony’s final plea to Laura is to reunite the “sad salmagundi of forty years gathered in, labelled and given a home” with their former owners “so that if you can make just one person happy, mend one broken heart by restoring to them what they have lost then it will have all been worthwhile”.  Each memento has a life of its own, a story to tell.  
There is undying love – some lost, some unrequited and some fulfilled.  There are wonderful friendships.  The unbearable sadness of people dying – in mind and body.  The gradual slides into dementia are addressed with humour and heartrending pathos: “‘Pretty damn sure that woman was my daughter. But there have to be some consolations for having this ruddy awful disease.’” said the man “whose dementia was casting him adrift. A once majestic galleon whose sails had worn thin and tattered, no longer able to steer its own course but left to the mercy of every squall and storm” and whose “reason had set sail for faraway climes … he occasionally took a brief shore leave in reality, but for the most part the old Godfrey had jumped ship”; another gentleman developing “a hairline crack in his solid, dependable sanity. … that in time he would be as vulnerable as a name written in the sand at the mercy of an incoming tide”.  And also the joy of life and living.  
I love this book, 5 stars is not enough.  It deserves to be on everyone’s reading list – read, enjoyed and then shared with all your friends.

This was an absolute delight of a read! Found it to be charming, emotional, insightful and fun! Not often that a story can mix all those qualities so well!

We follow the story of Anthony Peardew who finds himself collecting up items he finds on his travels - be that on a train, or by a park bench. These items are all catalogued and kept in his study which is off limits to his housekeeper Laura, who is intrigued but respects the privacy he demands.

We also see the story through the eyes of Laura who has her own tales of a troubled personal life, but all seems brighter when she started working for Anthony, but she knows he isn't getting any younger and finds herself worried for the future. It is a really touching relationship between the two and upon his death she finds that she inherits his home, her sanctuary, and all that is inside - and that includes the Lost Things which he wants her to try and find their rightful owners.

Throughout the story we also hear the story of Eunice during the 1970's and on, and you do wonder about the significance of this storyline but it is cleverly woven in and provides another insight .

One of my major loves of this book as the character of Sunshine. She is a wonderful breath of fresh air with her innocence and outlook and she seems to have an extraordinary gift for picking up on the emotions behind the Lost Things.

I really loved the flow of this story - it is full of poignant stories that has you thinking about the stories attached to random items as they must have meant something to somewhere sometime! As Laura, Sunshine and Freddy the gardener begin their quest to reunite items the significance of the task that Anthony set them becomes clearer and re-awakens some old ghosts.

Beautiful debut and will definitely be looking out for future Ruth Hogan books!

Ruth Hogan's book is about memory, in a way. Author Anthony Peardew tragically mislaid a relatively  cheap memento given to him by his fiancée - the tragedy being that he lost it on the day she died in an accident. In memory of Therese, his fiancée, Anthony goes out of his way to pick up items lost by others. His original intent is to restore them to their owners but, since he is an author of short stories, he instead he creates little vignettes of items and their imagined owners. He also seems to collect slightly lost people - a gardener, a young neighbour and Laura, a young woman brought low by a difficult marriage and subsequent divorce, who becomes his assistant. Laura is starting to rebuild her life when Anthony dies, leaving her his home and a mission to restore all the lost things to their rightful places (and people). She is reluctant to put much effort into this until she realises there is some kind of spirit in the house which will not let her rest with the job undone.

This is a lovely book - it has characters I cared about (but with flaws and foibles), a slightly quirky plot and, as a bonus, lots of the stories Anthony wrote about the Lost Things are included. We often remember people via objects which we connect with them and, just as often, we recall our own pasts in the same way. We are just not always so good at remembering where these objects are - it gave me a warm feeling to read about Laura, and the friends she makes through her connection to Anthony and his collection of lost objects, helping others to regain those mementoes and those memories.

This book is a bit out of my comfort zone, my normal reads having at least one grisly murder in them, but that was exactly the reason I chose to request The Keeper of Lost Things from NetGalley; I do love my murder mysteries but every now and again I get a bit overwhelmed and I want something warm and fuzzy to take the edge off. The Keeper of Lost Things is definitely that, but in places it was a bit too sugary sweet for me.
I'm still in two minds about this book. It took me a while to get into it, the first 30% or so is all over the place; it takes a while to set up the characters and spends a long time in explaining their history, instead of letting it develop throughout.

As with the plot, I found the characters very hit and miss too. Some, like Eunice and Sunshine, were well-developed and interesting, but others, including the lead character of Laura, didn't have much depth and I really struggled to connect with her.

The love story was a bit lack lustre, there was no passion, no suspense and rather a cliched, hunky gardener love interest.

I feel like I'm being really negative about this book which is unfair as it definitely has its merits. After ploughing through the first third of the book the rest was better and the tempo flowed steadily and I became more invested in Anthony and Laura's task.

There were other elements I enjoyed; the weaving in of stories of the lost things' owners was a lovely touch and were like small character studies.
I particularly liked Lilia, who came out with this rather fantastic quote:

"Lilia's own mother had taught her two things: dress for oneself, and marry for love."

I think, to really enjoy this book, you just have to accept that it's soppy and ladles it on in parts, one of the characters is even called Sunshine for God's sake! It also has some rather spectacularly unbelievable coincidences.
But, if you go with the sweetness, The Keeper of Lost Things is an enjoyable read that does leave you with a warm and fuzzy, if a little sickly, feeling.

It's a very good antidote for the January blues. It's best read under a duvet with a dog at your side. A woolly jumper is good too.

My rating: 3/5

I received an ARC of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. My thanks to the author and publisher.

Laura has nothing left to lose when she applies for a job as a housekeeper and secretary for writer  Anthony Peardew. Her marriage to her cheating childhood sweetheart has collapsed, her burning desire for children was never fulfilled and she has no education to speak of. Anthony’s house is like a balm on her soul, quiet, beautiful and filled with the bitter sweet memories of Anthony’s dead wife. There is only one room, the study, that she is not permitted to enter. When Anthony dies and leaves her everything Laura is shocked, especially when she learns there is a caveat to the will. Inside the study is a lifetime’s worth of lost objects that Anthony has collected and meticulously catalogued. He wants Laura to reunite them with their owners and complete his life’s work.

This novel has a little of everything, mystery, history, magic, ghosts and romance. Some aspects are great and some are not. First, the parts that did not work. The ghost of Anthony’s wife, and the magical ability of Summer, a neighbouring girl with Down Syndrome who becomes firm friends with Laura, seem a little forced. Rather than manifesting themselves slowly they appear as and when the plot needs to develop. The relationship with Freddy the gardener also feels a little flat, and truly the story would have been all the better had Laura built herself into a strong independent woman without him. It is a colour by numbers romance: hot, mysterious, silent man; woman who believes she could never be considered attractive again; lots of misunderstandings...it never really rings true. Finally, there is something a little snobbish about some of the descriptions that pop out like a poke in the eye. In one instance Laura describes the girls her husband has affairs with as ‘the kind of girls that drop their knickers as quickly as they drop their aiches’, there were also some comments about single mothers on benefits all smoking Benson and Hedges that were irksome. Now whether these are Laura’s opinions, a woman who admits she wished to escape her poor upbringing for the kind of life that has tea-tray doilies, or the author’s own, remains to be seen.

Now for the parts that work. The flash back stories linked to each object are fabulous and show Hogan’s incredible skill at creating immediately relatable characters. Each story is an absolute gem, giving sufficient information to peak your interest but leaving enough unsaid to have you wondering what happened next. The descriptions of the house are rich enough for the reader to believe they are there, and Anthony’s character is fascinating. Beyond all else though, it is the concurrent story of Eunice and Bomber, which runs throughout the book that is an absolute joy to read. Eunice is gregarious, colourful and full of life, while Bomber fills the page with his personality making it easy to see why Eunice falls in love with him. The descriptions of their small publishing office, their dogs and their beautiful, platonic relationship throughout the years are exceptional and so believable that you will feel like you are saying goodbye to friends when you finish the last page. Their story will have you laughing and crying in turn, making them the true stars of this novel.

This is a delightful, charming, and comic read set in London and Brighton which I adored. Laura is a divorced and broken woman for whom intimacy has proved to be a disappointment. She finds employment as housekeeper and assistant to writer Anthony Peardew, who experienced heartbreak with the loss of his beloved Therese on his wedding day. That event has coloured and haunted his entire life, with guilt over a broken promise, a lost communion medal, and led to the enormous collection of lost items which he has found with the hope of reuniting them with their owners. He dies, leaving his home, Padua, to Laura for whom it is a sanctuary, with a condition that she makes efforts to restore the lost items to their true owners. Whilst owning Padua brings security and delight to Laura, the real prize turns out to be the task Anthony sets for it offers Laura a path toward resurrecting her life again, tenuously learning to trust people and connect with the world again. 

With faltering steps,Laura befriends the extraordinary girl that is Sunshine, a downs syndrome child who has been bullied. Sunshine is special and has the capacity to see and understand things that elude Laura, particularly when it comes to a irascible and troubled ghost and the lost items. Laura, Freddy, the gardener, Sunshine, and Carrot, a rescued dog, begin to connect as a unit slowly developing the strength to overcome obstacles such as the ugly local rumours concerning Laura. There is a parallel story about Eunice and Bomber, and the tragedies and triumphs that litter their lives through time. The storylines do eventually connect. Interspersed throughout we have entrancing and shocking tales of some of the lost items, and the various situations that the owners found themselves in. Laura, with the help of Freddy and Sunshine, sets up a website documenting the lost collection only to find it becomes so much more than she envisaged.

Ruth Hogan has weaved an intelligent, magical and fantastical tale of loss, love, heartbreak, redemption and hope. It is infused with whimsy and laugh out loud humour. It is beautifully written, and wonderfully descriptive. The wide ranging characters are what really makes the book, including the minor ones like the monstrous Portia and her ghastly novels. I cannot recommend this book enough, it is an enchanting contemporary fairytale and a great read. Many thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC.