Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho

Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers' hands as they walk down the road, people who--with sweetest face--drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath's Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.

About the Author :
Will McGrath has worked as a reporter, homeless shelter caseworker, public radio producer, UPS truck loader, Burger King mayo-applicator, ghostwriter, and ghosteditor, in slightly different order. He spent twenty months living in the southern African kingdom of Lesotho--the subject of his forthcoming book, Everything Lost is Found Again (Dzanc Books), which won the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize in 2017. He has written for The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Foreign Affairs, Guernica, and Roads & Kingdoms, among other magazines and journals. His writing has won nonfiction awards including the 2014 Felice Buckvar Prize and has been translated into Chinese, Hungarian, and Japanese.

Review :
"I was brought into a world I did not know existed and grew to care about two people I've never met. The author's compassion and wit, his eye for a telling detail and his ear for dialogue--all of it comes together as a pitch-perfect rendering of these two humans in letters on a page." -Mary Roach, author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War "With astute sensitivity, a reporter's eye, and a poet's command of language, McGrath introduces us to so much more than a place. He situates us inside the small quiet moments of grace that define everyday lives. The writing is at once joyous and devastating, luminous and tender." -Inara Verzemnieks, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Among the Living and the Dead "Who says there are no places left on earth to explore? In this charming memoir, Will McGrath traverses one of the world's least-known countries - Lesotho, tiny and mountainous, grappling with AIDS but rich with storybook history and its own invincible spirit. Everything Lost Is Found Again is beautifully written, by turns moving and hilarious. It's an enlightening adventure in the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor and V.S. Naipaul." -Tony Perottet, author of Off the Deep End: Travels in Forgotten Frontiers "In dazzling prose and with humor both tender and sidesplitting, McGrath pulls off what I most adore about foreign reportage: he makes me care deeply about a place I've never been and wish desperately that I, too, could visit the nation and share his experiences." --Rafe Bartholomew, former Grantland senior editor and author of Pacific Rims