As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.

Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.

This book contains mentions of child abuse.

As a child, I loved fantastical stories about magical worlds that reside adjacent to our own, and as an adult I’ve searched for stories that remind me of that feeling of wondrous discovery. Enter The Lost Story, an epic tale that will appeal to anyone who enjoys looking for magic in the ordinary.

Best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell vanished without a trace in the forest when they were teens and for six months no one was able to find them—until one day they magically reappeared. Neither boy could explain where they had been or what had happened to them. Flash forward fifteen years, the two friends have grown apart. Rafe is a recluse who has struggled since his homecoming. Jeremy on the other hand has made it his life’s work to find missing persons, and he is very good at it…almost too good. When a woman named Emilie enlists Jeremy’s help to uncover what happened to her long-lost sister who disappeared in the same forest as Jeremy and Rafe, the two friends will have to work together and revisit their past in order to unravel the mysterious disappearance.

The Lost Story is a whimsical book that captured me from the very first page. I’m sure you will be just as enchanted as I was by the book’s beautiful themes surrounding friendship, love, and bravery, which made this one of the most heartwarming books I’ve read this year.