Book Review: Lost Family

Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski

A serendipitous encounter at a work conference begins one man’s search for his family’s history in France in this heartwarming novel of human courage and new beginnings.

 A random comment, an old photo, and a rediscovered painting sets middle-aged divorcee Ben Griffiths on an unexpected journey to France to find the heartbreaking truth of his family’s history in Lost Family by Katherine Williams. 

In 2020, Ben Griffiths is a blue-collar distribution and logistics manager, still nursing his wounds from a recent divorce. At a professional conference, Ben meets Melanie Harris, a woman with a “clever pick-up line:” she says Ben looks just like the man in an old black-and-white photo she has on her living room wall. Looking at a copy on her phone, he sees the resemblance, too. The conversation is interrupted, however: Ben’s grandmother, Nana, is passing away. 

Arriving too late to say goodbye, Ben finds among his grandmother’s possessions a satchel full of drawings and paintings. Unrolling a scroll, he recognizes within the painting the same location inside Melanie’s photo. 

Intrigued, Ben begins to seek answers about the painter’s identity but also to find his own path, “to travel his own road, even if it meant falling into some potholes along the way.” Ben’s is a poignant, contemporary story (with a guest appearance by COVID-19, no less) that unexpectedly delights with its cozy moments of romance as he renovates a convent into a dreamy bed-and-breakfast lodge. Ben’s queries into the provenance of the painting point to France, and so his journey back to France is the peaceful counterpart to the other half of Williams’s dynamic juxtaposition. 

For this is a story within a story, and the hero of this one is Amélie Maurois, a seventeen-year-old girl in Sablé-sur-Manse, France, in 1939. Amélie, a talented artist, is a boisterous girl in love with her sister Paulette’s beau, Bruno, but the frolic of those final, youthful summers ends forever when the Germans invade France in 1940. Amélie soon joins up with the French underground resistance without her family’s knowledge. 

But there are plenty of secrets within the Maurois household, which Williams spices up with a dashing foreign agent named Georges who stumbles into Amélie’s adoring eyes. Who can one trust? 

Williams evocatively recreates the ordeal of a typical French family living under Nazi occupation and suffering increasingly violent harassment by their Vichy henchmen. Secrets, spies, and wild escapes abound, making the 1940s chapters by far the most thrilling—and heartbreaking—parts of Lost Family. 

Through all his research, Ben is drawn closer to this discovery of a “lost family,” which all leads back to Amélie—but perhaps not as expected. Williams’s engaging eye into the fraught early years of grassroots French resistance is instructive, as is the toll it takes on Amélie who fights being inoculated to its horrors, as “it was surreal, pretending not to care when people were gunned down…” It is her complicated journey and her connection to Ben that keeps the reader puzzling, but albeit, not for very long.

Lost Family is a gripping and entertaining tale, skillfully told—harrowing and heartwarming at turns—that explores the nature of history, family, and the sacrifices of those who came before. 

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