224 pages |Hardcover

A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author ofAtlas of Remote Islands
APublishers WeeklyBest Book of the Year
AFinancial TimesBest Book of the Year
Winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize

Each disparate object described in this booka Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacificshares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit,An Inventory of Lossesis a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss.
With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author ofAtlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.