On a cold January morning Susan leaves her husband alone for a few minutes and returns to find him gone. He has Alzheimer's-he no longer knows how to dress or feed or wash himself-and he has wandered alone into a frigid landscape with no sense of home or direction. Lost.
The massive search for her husband brings Susan together with Jeff, a search and rescue expert and social worker preoccupied with his young wife's betrayal. Hovering on the periphery is Corey, a young boy rendered mute and abandoned by his family after setting a fire in which his older brother was killed. His fate has been placed in Jeff's hands. As Susan and Jeff endure an intolerable wait for news, and Corey waits to learn his future, the search becomes an internal one too. Susan silently considers the diagnosis that transformed her marriage into a caretaking relationship, the abrupt decision to leave her career and home for an isolated house in upstate New York, those few stolen moments alone. And Jeff confronts his devotion to a woman for whom he was never enough, and the urgent need to find a home for Corey.
Written in spare, beautiful prose, Lostexplores the ways the simplest, briefest of moments--a fleeting instinct, a turned back, a split-second decision--can have a profound impact on our lives and the way responsibility, love, and sorrow can bind us together.
