A novel by Michael King

A Wyatt Book for St. Martin's Press

"Michael King's LORIEN LOST is a splendid romp, a grand imaginative journey, a joy!"

-- Ray Bradbury

"It has an eloquence that rises above mere nostalgia-mongering, and a humanity that passes through Larking Land and ultimately doesn't need to stay there to find wonders. This is at once a modest little book and a true pleasure."

-- Locus

"A dreamy first novel, owing more than a little to Lewis Carroll, and set in a wholly imaginative Victorian England. Quirkily charming in a literary way."

-- Kirkus

"Michael King's novel is quiet, sweetly comic and intentionally archaic, strewn with Victorian engravings and playful prose that is capable, without undue prompting, of transforming itself into poetry.This is a book for readers weary of explosions, perhaps the same audience that rushes to the latest Merchant/Ivory movie, hoping for some respite from the hectic modern world. With its flights of fanciful language, its visions of sunlit meadows and lazy picnics, its authentic homage to art's redemptive power, LORIEN LOST does offer refuge from the fray. That should be more than enough to guarantee it a delighted following."

--The Washington Post

"What a delight Michael King's LORIEN LOST is! A combination of George MacDonald and a Victorian Peter Leroy, a lovely jumble-box spilling out strange and imaginative toys. Michael King has a childlike imagination in the best sense."

-- Sarah Smith, author of The Vanished Child

"..., a parable on the dangers and powers of the artistic imagination, fuses fantasy and romance in a recreation of the style and spirit of Victorian adventure novels. ... captivates with its imaginative vision and lyrical prose."

-- Publisher's Weekly

"In an era of copy-media when everyone is trying to clone the last big success, Santa Cruz writer Michael King has staked out his own terrain. His debut novel, LORIEN LOST, is a whimsical Victorian fable that wriggles out of every attempt to classify it. Part fairy tale, part social comedy, it's a hero's journey of self-discovery told with the stylistic fancy of a blithely unhinged imagination. "

--Good Times

An enchanting "new Victorian" novel about a quest for love and art

The setting is Victorian England. Timid Milton Radcliffe is an art collector with a curious gift: He can "step inside" paintings, thus entering the artist's imaginative world. In this manner he meets the lovely Lorien, depicted in pastoral works by her artist-husband, Jonathan Larking. Milton is devastated when a gallery fire on his London estate destroys the only painting of her he owns.

Discovering Larking's private journal, Milton learns that a life-size sculpture of Lorien exists in the couple's old summer retreat, somewhere in the Devonshire landscape already familiar to him through the destroyed painting. To find the statue, Milton must puzzle out the exact location of the real-life "Larking Land" while circumventing deliciously Dickensian unscrupulous contemporaries as well as fantastic medieval apparitions rooted in his boyhood fears of falling off the End of the World.

He is joined in this expedition by Heather, described in Larking's diary as a little girl. Now grown to a beautiful young opera singer whose voice has mysteriously disappeared, Heather cannot lead Milton to "Larking Land" until she confronts and defeats malevolent forces emanating from the labyrinthine passages of a dilapidated theater. Milton and Heather's journey becomes a quest through the luminous and darker sides of the Victorian imagination.

Cover art: "A Dell in Devonshire," by Myles Birkett Foster II. Reproduced courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Hardcover. 192 pages, illustrated with over four dozen engravings.
LORIEN LOST, published by A Wyatt Book for St. Martin's Press, is now available through Daedalus Books ($3.98, item #71351). To order, call 1-800-395-2665, or click here to order directly from their web site.

Available in bookstores. You may also order LORIEN LOST directly from St. Martin's Press by calling Ray Kelly/Individual Cash Sales: 1-800-288-2131. VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express accepted. 5446 Arthur Kill Rd., Staten Island, NY 10307