I have just finished reading one of the most enjoyable and pleasing novels I’ve read in a long time. Someone on our Italian trip was reading it and recommended it. She was right.
“The Dictionary of Lost Words” is an imaginative and engrossing story about words, language, love and loss all tied up in the life of a growing-up narrator who is five years old at the start in 1886 and helping her “Da’ in the Scriptorium. The novel ends in the 1920s as the Oxford English Dictionary is published. 
The evening sun makes lovely shadows above the mantlepiece – here of a beautiful piece of Esther Smith’s work, an automaton of a Hare and a flower.
We have had a torrid three weeks with a medical problem hanging over me. Today, it has been resolved and all is well, much to our enormous relief.
