The Lost Manuscript

The Lost Manuscript / Cathy Bonidan
NY: St. Martins, 2021, c2019.
274 p.

This is a title that I heard of thanks to WIT Month in a previous year. I thought it sounded charming, and it's in epistolary format, which is something I really love. So I found it via my library and gave it a go. 

Unfortunately, I wanted to like it much more than I ended up doing. It is told in a series of letters back and forth between a widening group of writers. Anna-Lise Briard finds an old manuscript in a hotel side table, and reads it; it touches her so much she tries to find out who left it there, and then trace that line back to who might have written it. 

Letters fly back and forth across France and into England as people are introduced to each other through their connection to the manuscript. Anne-Lise seems like a nosy person with a lot of time on her hands, despite working for a publisher full-time. Her actions drive the story, though, and without her busybody interventions there would be no book ;) 

Anyhow, I liked the idea, and some of the letters were amusing - the differing tones in letters between new acquaintances and old friends was nicely done. The epistolary format was used effectively, with the different ways in which people write to one another used appropriately to develop the story. 

There was a romantic arc between Anna-Lise's friend Maggy and an English character, but it was kind of ho-hum -- and that was my problem with this book in the end. I did find the plot to be a little weak and overly sentimental. By the end I didn't really care who wrote the manuscript or why, and felt like it was very unlikely to have changed the life of everyone who had ever laid eyes on it. So if you're in the mood for something really light with loads of sentiment this might hit the spot, but it just didn't gel for me at this moment.