The history of the world is full of things that have been lost - unintentionally destroyed or lost to the passage of time. In her book, Judith Shalansky tries to capture what the lost leaves behind: echoes and erased traces, rumors and legends, signs of oblivion and phantom pains. A painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a view of a tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific - this by definition incomplete catalog of the lost and vanished becomes the ark for twelve stories that reveal their narrative power where conventional tradition fails. The main characters of these stories are people or their spirits struggling with transience: an old man who preserves the knowledge of humanity in his garden in Ticino, a painter of ruins who creates the past as it never was, an aged Greta Garbo who wanders around Manhattan, wondering when she was the one who could have died, and the writer Judith Schalansky traces the traces of GDR history in the empty spaces of her own childhood. This book, winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize and an International Booker finalist, has been praised by many critics around the world, because it shows that the difference between presence and absence can be insignificant as long as memory and literature exist, allowing one to feel how close preservation and destruction, loss and creation are to each other.