Lost & Found Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

What do you do when your heart breaks open and fills up at the exact same moment?

This National Bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning work from New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz captures the strange, beautiful collision of falling in love while losing a parent. It’s a book about the things we find and the things we lose—from car keys to fathers, from ancient ruins to the person who will change your life over lunch.

Schulz weaves together memoir and meditation with startling grace. She writes about meeting her future wife just as her brilliant, absentminded father enters the hospital with what should have been a minor condition. What follows is an exploration of how we navigate joy and grief when they arrive hand-in-hand, uninvited and inseparable.

But this isn’t just a book about one woman’s experience. Schulz illuminates something universal: we each lose roughly 200,000 objects over our lifetimes, and those everyday disappearances teach us something about our most devastating losses. She explores what it means to seek—whether we’re searching for meaning, faith, love, or simply our misplaced phone.

Longlisted for the National Book Award and praised by Anne Lamott as utterly stunning, Lost & Found is the kind of book that makes you want to call someone you love. It’s about the families we’re born into and the ones we choose, about sustaining wonder even when life breaks your heart.

Perfect for anyone navigating change, loss, or the messy beauty of being human.

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