Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

Who could have been so cruel as to do away with poor Vivian Lambert? And why oh why couldn’t she just stay dead?

In a rustic, idyllic English village, on a summer’s day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family’s front garden.

Years pass and the mystery persists: an enduring torment for the teenage Christine Gray, the last person to see Vivian alive. Perhaps if she’d shown the girl a little kindness, and seen her safely home, Vivian might still be with them? Yet when someone claiming to be a grown-up Vivian returns to the land of the living, the enigma seems only to deepen, threatening to consume the wicked and innocent alike.

Equal parts The Turn of the Screw, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and gothic thriller, Twice Lost was admired by such authors as Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and John Cowper Powys—yet the strange, haunting novels of Phyllis Paul are themselves a mystery with no simple solution. Virtually lost to time even before her death, her novels have been out of print for more than fifty years, and fetch fantastic prices in the rare book trade.

Phyllis Paul published eleven novels between 1933 and 1967, but otherwise left almost no trace of herself. She was unmarried, lived quietly, and was intensely private. She died in 1973, at the age of 70, after being hit by a motorcycle. If not for a label on her pocket handkerchief, her body would have remained unidentified.

Jeremy M. Davies is a writer and editor who lives in New York.