The Book of Lost Hours: A Q&A with Hayley Gelfuso

By Hayley Gelfuso, Isabelle McConville / August 29, 2025 at 12:01 am

This is the kind of book that will hold on to your heartstrings. Time-travel, romance and shadows of history are bundled into one sweeping tale of memory and identity. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with author Hayley Gelfuso on writing The Book of Lost Hours.

Hardcover $26.99 ~~$29.99~~

The Book of Lost Hours (GMA Book Club Pick)

By Hayley Gelfuso

In Stock Online

Hardcover $26.99 ~~$29.99~~

For fans of The Ministry of Time and The Midnight Library, a sweeping, unforgettable novel following two remarkable women moving between postwar and Cold War-era America and the mysterious time space, a library filled with books containing the memories of those who bore witness to history.

IM: Can you please set up the story of your new book for us?

HG: The Book of Lost Hours follows a girl named Lisavet Levy, who finds herself trapped in a library called the time space, which contains books that hold all of the memories of the dead, and she realizes that she can’t get out. She grows up inside of this library where she learns that people known as timekeepers are entering to destroy books and memories in order to reshape history. There’s also this secondary plot in the future with this young woman named Amelia Duquesne; right after her uncle passes away, she’s approached by a woman called Moira who asks her to help them recover something that her uncle had been looking for inside the time space. She pieces together that the past isn’t necessarily what she has always assumed that it was.

IM: This is your debut novel — how does it feel to have this book coming out?

HG: I’ve been writing my entire life, but I never really took it seriously until 2019; that was when I started really thinking about taking writing more seriously and what it could actually become. This idea in particular came to me in 2021 when I was reading this book called The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen. There is one passage from the book that’s about the history of the library and how it was formed, where it came from, the different players involved. Of course, with that comes a heavy dose of censorship and history of the times that different governments or religious groups have tried to destroy libraries. That’s a common thread that carried through into the book. The idea itself came from this one particular poem that’s written on a library outside of Amsterdam, which is one of the first libraries that enacted something called the Rule of Silence, where people are supposed to be quiet in the library. At the very end of the poem, it says, ‘Here it is the dead who speak to those who work.’ It was one of those light bulb moments where I was thinking about a library where the dead literally talked to the living and what that might look like. I sat on the idea for about a year before I did anything with it at all. I think I wrote out the first draft, which was about a hundred thousand words which made it into the final, then in the fall of 2023, I decided there was something in this story that kept calling back to me. I’m going to sit down and actually write this. It all happened to come out in about six weeks, which is pretty quick, but it was one of those things where once I had the hook and the idea and I had committed to the story, then the story really brought itself to me.

IM: We meet Lisavet first in 1938, Germany. How did you know you wanted to open the book with her?

“The gravity and the weight of that night felt like a really natural tipping off point both for the character and for the story.”

HG: In the origin story of the book, Lisavet was not my main character, and that was not where it started. The reason why the book spoke to me so much is actually because in the process of writing the first draft, I came across her character, and I had always known that she existed, and this was her first scene, but it was told in little vignette chapters midway through the first draft. When I realized this little girl trapped in the time space was desperately trying to save the memories that are stored inside of these books, I realized that that really is the heart of the story for more reasons than just one. I think her character spoke to me, but also that moment in history, which was Kristallnacht, where everything in the world started to change for the worse. It was a moment where we really saw mankind tip in a direction that I think we are still pulling out of. It created a ripple effect that obviously led to World War II, but it also led to everything else that we’re dealing with today. During that night, there were a lot of books burned, a lot of people and memories erased and ripped out of their existence. The gravity and the weight of that night felt like a really natural tipping off point for the character and for the story.

IM: It really sets the scene for where we’re going in the book. There’s also a romantic storyline included in the book — can you tell me how you knew you wanted to include that?

“Loving someone is the most dangerous thing . . . it changes who you are.”

HG: I’ve always been a fan of romantic subplots in stories, and I think this was my chance to live out my dreams. I don’t think I will ever be solely a romance writer, but I have always loved people who can do that. The role that the romance plays is very oriented towards how the things that we love change us and, in some ways, destroy us, because Lisavet and Earnest circle each other. When one is thinking in one way morally, the other one is thinking something else. They flip and flop and go back and forth in terms of how they’re influencing each other. There is a line later on in the book where Lisavet says something about how living is not the most dangerous thing, which is something that Azrael has told her throughout the entire book; he says the most dangerous thing to be is alive because you’re subject to the whims of the world. Lisavet says no, that actually isn’t the most dangerous thing in the world — loving is. Loving someone is the most dangerous thing because it changes who you are. It changes your motivations in ways you don’t necessarily expect in terms of how that person shapes you, and also the choices you make for that person.

IM: I also really loved Ernest’s character; can you tell me a little bit about creating his character and finding his voice? I noticed you also dedicated the book to someone named Ernest.

HG: Ernest was my grandfather’s name. Most people who knew him called him Ernie, and I called him Papa. I’ve had a couple of people say like, ‘Oh, you named him after your grandfather and he’s the romantic lead. Isn’t that weird?’ And I say, not really, because I didn’t call him that growing up and I didn’t know him as that. I did intentionally name him after my grandfather because it was a book about a place where you could go visit the memories of the dead. If I could go visit anyone’s memories, it would be his. In terms of Ernest the character versus Ernest the man, my grandfather was born and raised in Tennessee in this tiny little town. He was a farm boy, and I don’t for sure know if he was illiterate. I just know that whenever I asked him to read books as a child, he would say no, and my mother told me at some point to stop asking him because it made him uncomfortable because he wasn’t very good at it.

I was trying to build on this archetype of the lost generation man and what that type of person looked like. He’s a product of a lot of philosophical ideas that existed at the time. One of the things I did for research was read a lot of philosophy that was popular at the time. I looked back on what people were reading, what people were thinking about, and how idealized Americans were the best type of mindset to be changed or altered. I was trying to ground him in this idea of the quintessential American man in the fifties, and then grow him and have him come to realize the differences in what his ideologies are originally versus the reality of the world that he’s living in.

IM: Do you map out and structure your books before you start or does it come to you in the process?

HG: It’s both. I usually have the premise — I always have to have the beginning fleshed out — and then I have one or two major plot points that I’m working towards. In terms of what happens in between those moments, I don’t always necessarily know when I start. I always have characters, at least what I think they are in the beginning, and then they become their own people as the story goes on. I usually start with the concept, the beginning of the book, sometimes the end, even though it’s not super tidy.

IM: I also noticed how prevalent poetry was throughout the novel. Why did you decide to include that?

“In the world nowadays, I think the emotional equivalent to poetry is music. Poetry is a way of communicating that we have sort of left behind in our modern times.”

HG: I like to think I’m a poet, but I don’t that I will ever be known for my poetry. I have always been a big fan of poetry; when I was in high school, I had a couple of classes where one of the things that we needed to do was memorize poems. There’s a few that I can still recite, which I’m really proud of, but that was a big part of my high school experience. It’s also always been something that I’ve pursued in the background as a part of my own reading, just because I think that there are things you can say in poetry that you can’t say any other way except for maybe in song. In the world nowadays, I think the emotional equivalent to poetry is music. Poetry is a way of communicating that we have sort of left behind in our modern times. There aren’t many people that I know personally who still read and interact with poetry who aren’t students studying it for some reason. And I think that’s sad, and I think that people should bring it back and reengage with it because it is emotion distilled in a way that I don’t think we can really do with anything else in our world.

IM: I do think we can see, aside from just the references to poetry and poets in the book, I think you can see the influence of your background in poetry in the actual writing. You have very beautiful sentences and there’s a rhythm to them, where I feel like someone who doesn’t have that poetic eye might look over.

HG: I appreciate that. I think it’s interesting because all of the books that we still have from years and years and years ago, they’re all epic poems. They’re all poetry based — I think there’s a reason for that. It’s something in the rhythm and the rhyme structure. Maybe part of why we don’t engage with it as much anymore is because when we’re in high school, we dissect them so aggressively and we’re like, ‘This is a metaphor and this is a meter, and this is how you have to analyze this.’ You get told that this is what this poem means, and if you don’t feel that or understand that, then you’re dumb. I think it’s the wrong way to approach it.

IM: I saw that you call yourself an amateur botanist and a nature enthusiast. I wonder if you can think of any way that your love of nature and the natural world comes through in your creative process when you’re writing?

“We think of [nature] as this isolated thing that doesn’t impact us . . . nature and the environment are part of us.”

HG: I think it definitely does. One thing I should mention, I have a master’s in biology. Part of getting that degree involved going to some very remote places to do field courses. I’ve been to Belize, India and Kenya on these courses. The connection in terms of my writing process has always been that when we think about nature and the natural world, we think of it as this isolated thing that doesn’t really impact us on the day-to-day, and it’s something that we have to go seek out. In reality, nature and the environment are part of us. Nature is also people, and that’s one of the main things I took away from all of those field courses. Whatever we do as people impacts everything, whether it’s the amount of water we use or the types of plants we grow in our garden. Nature impacts my writing process primarily because when I’m stuck, I will go out and go for a walk, usually in a forest or something like that. I’ll bring my husband and now we have an eight-month-old who comes along. I think of it as a grounding presence. In this book, there’s a big reference to Forget-Me-Nots for multiple reasons. One of the things that fascinated me about them, is that when you translate the name Forget-Me-Not in English, Russian and German, it still has the same meaning. For a lot of plants, that’s not necessarily the case, because we as people with different languages discovered plants at all different times and named them our own different things, but for some reason, there’s this unifying association with memory for Forget-Me-Nots that I thought was really cool for the book.

IM: Is there anything you’re either watching, reading, or listening to right now that’s been inspiring you?

HG: I am a big fan of stalking award lists, and the Booker Prize Long List for Fiction just came out and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since I was in high school. I’ve been reading through some of that, but I’m also in a weird spot right now because I have an eight-month-old who is not the greatest at napping or understanding when I tell him I have to go get writing done. He demands a lot of attention, which he should. I’ve viewed myself as being in this space where I’m working on things in the background, but primarily what I’m doing right now is taking things in and reading a lot. I’m reading through award lists and things like that just for fun. I like to keep up with it, but I’m also reading a lot of backlists. Earlier this year I read a lot of Barbara Kingsolver’s backlist. I’ve always loved her. I think I’m tending back towards my roots of more nature writing and leaning back in that way from a writing perspective. That’s what’s been pulling at me lately.

IM: I took a creative writing class years and years ago, and I had a professor tell me something that stuck with me throughout my life, which was, ‘Your writing is only as good as your reading.’ Even when you’re not writing, you’re still tending to the author within you. It’s a crucial part of the process.

HG: It really is. The year that I wrote The Book of Lost Hours was one of the best reading years of my life. It’s no coincidence that that was the case, because I think I was reading a lot of classics, but the Women’s Prize for Fiction List was particularly good that year.

IM: Hayley, thanks so much for being here.

HG: Thanks for having me.