The Lost Landscape

A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we’ve never seen her before.

In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colours everything that comes after. With memoriesranging from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, this is an arresting account of the ways in which Oates’s life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard rural upbringing.

Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision and transports the reader to a bygone place and time – the lost landscape of the writer’s past but also the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.

‘A compelling and at times mysterious testimony to a life of letters like no other I know’ – Richard Ford