World history is full of things that are lost—willfully destroyed or gone astray over time. In her new book, Judith Schalansky focuses on what the lost leaves behind: faded echoes and blurred traces, rumors and legends, ellipses and phantom pains. Starting from lost natural and artistic objects such as the songs of Sappho, the torn-down Palace of the Republic, an extinct tiger species, or an island sunken in the Pacific, she creates an inherently incomplete catalog of the missing and vanished, which unfolds its narrative power where conventional accounts fail. The protagonists of these stories are figures on the sidelines, fighting against transience: an old man hoarding the knowledge of humanity in his garden in Ticino, a painter of ruins capturing the fleeting nature of existence.