Lost Girl

By: Adam Nevill

Narrated by: James Parsons

Set amidst the devastation of climate change and global pandemics, Lost Girl is a dystopian nightmare from the master of horror Adam Nevill.

How far will he go to save his daughter? How far will he go to get revenge?

It's 2053 and climate change has left billions homeless and starving - easy prey for the pandemics that sweep across the globe, scything through the refugee populations. Easy prey, too, for the violent gangs and people-smugglers who thrive in the crumbling world where 'King Death' reigns supreme.

The father's world went to hell two years ago. His four-year-old daughter was snatched from his garden when he should have been watching. The moments before her disappearance play in a perpetual loop in his mind. But the police aren't interested; amidst floods, hurricanes and global chaos, who cares about one more missing child? Now it's all down to him to find her, him alone . . .

‘Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real . . . Lost Girl succeeds brilliantly’ – The Guardian

Critic reviews

Nevill ornaments his tale of brutality and bloodshed with florid Gothic prose, like flock wallpaper gracing a torture dungeon. There's acute psychological insight amid Lost Girl's squalid inferno, and the author's vision of our near future is horribly plausible. (James Lovegrove)

Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real . . . Nevill's portrayal of the breakdown of civilisation, mirrored by the father's own spiralling moral crisis, is unflinchingly realistic - though not without hope. The author says he wanted the novel to amend "the status of climate change from the existential to the very real", and in this Lost Girl succeeds brilliantly

Bleak, disturbing and terrifying - and horribly compelling.

Nevill concocts a unique, paranoid vision of dystopian drama that's nigh impossible not to get sucked into

Lost Girl, to put it simply, is absolutely stunning . . . The book will change you by its end. And once you get there, you won't regret one moment spent!

Set amongst the stereotypically British boarding houses and tacky seaside resorts of the south coast of England, Lost Girl still manages to feel like a Sam Peckinpah movie

This is a journey you need to go on yourself. Put some time aside, get comfortable and pour yourself a stiff drink. You're going to need it

Lost Girl is a brutally powerful novel, it forces us to look both inwards at ourselves, to wonder if we would go to the same lengths, and one that forces us to look at the world we live in, can we halt the downward decline of our world or will we face a slow and inevitable decline into oblivion. The Future presented in Lost Girl may be a bleak one, but the future of Horror with writers such as Nevill at the helm is a bright future for all

Lost Girl is an outstanding novel, a gripping, terrifying read from an author who never fails to deliver. It's a book that ably demonstrates that the horrors that arise from human nature itself are just as terrifying as those of a supernatural nature. It's a novel I highly recommend

The almost prophetic descriptions of a vast refugee crisis (considering Nevill wrote this book before the current problems hit the papers) was almost spooky in its timeliness. And the vivid details of his story-weaving sucks you right out of this world into the one he is master of. As with all of his books, I advise that you read it at your own risk. But at the same time, you will be glad you did

A novel which recognises the complex lives we all lead, that of private intimates (family, lovers, friends) as well as global citizens. It's how these two intermesh that determine the way things go for us, and by exploring these double realms of experience with such conviction, Nevill's narrative tears us apart at the end of the book. It's all too true in our troubled times, and I fear the novel will grow increasingly topical as the years unfold (Gary Fry)

A rare miss for the author

I'm generally a fan of Nevill's work, finding some of it legitimate modern classics. But this one didn't really work for me. I think overall, an issue is that the two different sides of bleakness (trafficking/kidnapping vs climate catastrophe) never meshed together that well, and the latter often felt like background noise to the moment-to-moment plot.

But more specifically, the story itself struggled to grab me. I initially put the book down midway through because it felt like the protagonist was stuck in a slog, that felt too grimly repetitive for me to have much investment in. I came back to it a while later, and my interest went up a bit as he was finally making some progress - but then the last few hours lost me again, as the story tried to send in different directions that never really landed for me.

Overall it wasn't terrible, it just mostly failed to connect with me in a way unlike other works I've read from the author.