The Loss Library

What happens when a story goes missing or remains unrecorded? When a writer carelessly gives his plot away during a conversation or dies before writing the ending? These stories end up in the Loss Library, where the books that have never been written are kept.

In this poignant, thought-provoking book, one of South Africa's finest writers examines eleven of his own lost fictions, how the ideas arose and why he abandoned them. But this reflection on the art of writing is not a lament for unfinished work. Rather The Loss Library is a meditation on creativity, mortality and the allure of the incomplete.