"When she sat down across from him, his body surged with a sudden thrill, a near cousin of anxiety. It seemed somehow unbelievable that she was here, and with him of all people. The drawn stares of the café’s patrons were pulled into her field, but when she smiled at him her poles switched and every other look fell clattering to the floor, leaving the two of them alone once more in their own private dominion..."
- "True North" (Book One: The Cross).
“Existence is not everything. It is even the least of things” – Jean Baudrillard
The Lost Place plunges the reader into the world of Truelove and Shell, two lovers who inhabit a bohemian urban enclave called ‘the Cross’ in an unnamed city at an indeterminate time that feels very much like early-mid twentieth century Europe.
Our lovers lead an idle and idyllic life together in the Cross. They spend their days and nights as they wish – in intimate embrace in their garret apartment, or in the company of their fellow habitués roaming the cafés and cabarets. They drink and dance, read poetry and philosophy, take drugs, make love, and experience complete freedom in one another’s company… but something is not quite right.
They become increasingly aware of the tentative and unstable nature of their lives, an unsettling undercurrent to all their ‘perfect days’. It is all too good to be true. Truelove begins to experience reality as if he is merely remembering what has already happened rather than actively living his own life; and it seems that he is not remembering it particularly well, either: Time slips and jumps, skips a beat; people, events, and places shift; identities merge and separate; things are forgotten and then remembered all wrong; the Cross keeps turning on its axis, turning into something new, something different. Things are never the same from one day to the next. It is unclear what is real, and what is merely fiction.
The Lost Place is a baroque romance, a surrealist puzzle, a little figment of a life we might once have led…
The Lost Place 