What a charming story perfectly suited to be an audiobook! If you are feeling nostalgic about letter writing, this epistolary tale will delight you.

On vacation in France, Anne-Lise Briaird discovers a manuscript in a nightstand while looking for something to read. She is enchanted by it and resolves to return it to the writer. The manuscript 's journey is slowly unraveled and the simple mystery ends up, as Anne-Lise says "an extraordinary tale full of plot twists, great passions, and missed opportunities."

With their lovely accents, the four narrators have done an outstanding job of adding to the charm of the story.

At first you may think the characters are too literate, too willing to share their stories with strangers. Letters go back and forth too quickly; phones and e-mail are mostly unused even though the year is 2016. But author Cathy Bonidan has taken 'poetic license', requiring the reader to suspend reality and live in the world she has created. It's a magical place to spend time.

BOTTOM LINE: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, but consider listening to the audiobook.

DISCLAIMER: A copy of The Lost Manuscript was provided to me by Dreamscape Media / NetGalley for an honest review.

I have read many books about the love of reading. This was a charming tale of how one book that wasn't even published but was read and affected the lives of many who read it. I thought it was fun to have the story unfold through letters written between all the different characters. There were several stories all overlapping and I really appreciated that it wasn't totally predictable. I was pleasantly surprised by the ending and how all was resolved. I actually listened to the audio book which had a full cast which helped me keep all the different characters straight. This as a lovely, clean read/listen.

A lost manuscript is found in the Beau Rivage Hotel by Anne-Lise Briard while on vacation in France, bringing to light a mystery for the ages.  Upon discovering an address inside the copy, Anne-Lisa proceeds to write a letter indicating she has found this manuscript.  The address leads to the author who lost it nearly 30 years ago.  Upon discovery and communication with the author and others, she learns the second half of the copy has been written by someone else.  Through letters by those touched by the copy, romance and secrets are revealed.  

This audio was challenging to navigate with multiple narrators.  In addition, the French accent made it difficult to understand at times.  I believe I would've enjoyed this better in book form rather than audio.  Total audio was only 5:21:39.  

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC publication for an honest review. 
Published - January 12, 2021

I adored this book! I knew nothing about it before requesting it through Netgalley and I'm so happy I did. I started it randomly while waiting for library holds and finished it in a day. I'd recommend it to fans of the movie Amelie-- it had the same fun, feel-good, wild-goose-chase story with delightfully French context. I especially enjoyed the narration. I loved that they were French-speaking narrators. The narrator who read Anne-Lise's letters always had so much joy in her narration.

This was very hard to read through audiobook. I got that It is a series of letters between a few people but about 3 chapters in I had lost track of who is who and what they were all talking about.  I finished it because I wanted to see if it changed anyhow, but it never did.  Could hear a little bit about the core story, but still don't get what it was about or how it exactly ended...
It was a book that reached many people and they all were connected through the book, but thats about all that I got from the book. Don't know what the book was about or why it was important to each person.

This book is:
- enchanting
- charming
- magical (but not in the supernatural sense)

This book is not:
- necessarily gripping
- heavy
- complicated (though I did have to stop a few times to remind myself of character names)

I received the audiobook version from NetGalley (thank you NetGalley!), which is usually my preferred medium, but I wish I would have read this in print. I think it would have added to the enchantment. That said, the audio performances were great, with different narrators for different characters.

All in all, a delightfully quick read/listen at just under six hours, with a snappy plot and intriguing characters.

I just finished listening to The Lost Manuscript a couple of days ago and I really enjoyed it. The story starts with a woman on a mission to reunite a lost manuscript to its author. They then work together to try to find all the other people who had acquired the novel and how it came into their possession.

The story is told through a series of letters between the characters. I haven't read many novels that are framed this way, but despite my initial hesitance I have found I really enjoy them. I like that there's some mystery behind each person writing the letters and you only know as much as you do about them by what they say. This is not to say that you're left in the dark about who they are, but its just a different experience from other fiction novels.

The story itself was fun and light. The characters are interesting, they all have regrets and difficult pasts, but through the friendships they find they're able to grow and work towards happiness. As I read I googled the locations where they live and travelled - needless to say I'm jealous and hope to someday visit these places. One of the things I loved most about the audiobook was that there were 4 narrators, which emphasize the various personalities of the different characters.

Thank you Netgalley, Cathy Bonidan and Dreamscape Media for providing me with a free copy in exchange for my honest review.

This book was just okay for me. I listened on audio and I had a hard time keeping track of the storyline and alternating view points. I do feel as if I would have enjoyed it much more if I had read a physical copy. It was an enjoyable read, however, and I could see myself going back to it to read instead of listen.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️4 stars, I enjoyed this audio book and I could understand how this could be a really good book for someone it just wasn’t for me, it took me a while to get into it and I didn’t feel the same spark I got with other books but it was a good book and it could easily be someone’s favorite book!

Thank you NetGalley and Cathy Bonidan for allowing me to read and review The Lost Manuscript.  Since reading Meg Cabot’s “The Boy Next Door” years ago, I have been a big fan of books written in the epistolary style.   Because “The Lost Manuscript” is more than a boy meets girl story, however, with its multiple narrators and stories within a story framework, I feel that By listening to this story rather than reading it in print, I missed out on the true epistolary experience.  Since I LOVED the complexity of this plot line, however, I will be reread it a print version of the book to fill in what I found lacking just by listening.

That said, the curiousity driving Anne-Lise to solve the mystery of how the 30-year-old manuscript she found while on holiday on the Brittany (Breton.?) coast ended up in the drawer of the bedside table of her hotel room was enough to hook me, as it was sufficient to persuade all of the people she corresponded with or otherwise encountered during her “quest.”

A sweet little mystery about how books bring us together—delightful. I listened on audio and the French accents took a minute to get used to, but overall added to the telling of the story. The back and forth style of the letters is also probably easier to keep track of in the print version, but it only took a few chapters for the voices to be clear. I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a feel good escape.

This book was quite an enjoyable read (listen)! It follows various characters as they attempt to find out who added to a manuscript that was found in a hotel. It's written as letters to and from these characters, which I very much loved. Books that are written like this are some of my favorites because it is something different and fun from my usual reads.

However, it did get a bit confusing as an audiobook. I typically listen to them while I am doing laundry or dishes but with all the characters to keep track of, I had to kind of focus more on what was being said. This made it a bit harder to enjoy the actual book for me, which is why I am giving it the star rating I did. I think I would have liked it more as a physical book compared to an audiobook. Overall I thought the book had a good premise and was good, but it would have maybe been better for me if I had read it in a different format.

Anne-Lise finds a manuscript while she is staying at a hotel, and when she enjoys the story she decides to mail it to the address she finds within its pages - assuming this is the only copy. 

What follows is a story of discovery, told in epistolary form - as the author writes back and explains that the second half of the manuscript was written by a second person. Anne-Lise embarks on quest to find out what had happened to the manuscript, and over time she discovers various people who have touched the manuscript and who's lives were changed by it. 

Friendships are forged, and secrets are revealed. 

I listened to the audiobook - narrated by several French speakers, While it gave the book a good atmosphere, and stayed true to that fact that this is translated from French, it did mean that I had to work harder than I expected to follow along. Pronunciation of the English translation was unusual at times - often enough that it started significantly interfering with the story for me. 

I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I actually did in the end. I found it boring at times, and found my mind wandering to the point that I had to replay sections to ensure I could follow the plot.

This ended up being a much more exciting book than I thought it would be. This story follows a multitude of characters as Anne-Lise Briard tracks down the author(s) of a lost manuscript found in a hotel room. I loved the characters and the unexpected journey that this manuscript took. It's a sweet, simple story. I listened to this as an audiobook and found the narration charming.

This audiobook was pleasant to listen to, but I found myself quite confused about who was who for awhile and the ending ultimately did not wrap any of that up for me.

Can you imagine opening your night stand at a hotel and finding a manuscript sitting there. Would you be tempted to read it, would you leave it? Anne-Lise can’t help but read it, finds a phone number, and starts a crazy journey to find the two authors of the manuscript who she quickly learns don't know each other. Each person leads to the next and a story about how the manuscript touched and changed their lives. 

This book was a feel good story of love, loss, friendship, and connections. I gave it 4 stars because it was a good book but didn’t hold my attention as I thought it would.

Now that’s how you do an epistolary! An epistolary is written in the format of correspondence -- letters, emails, text messages, etc.

“The Lost Manuscript” is about the journey a manuscript takes, through all these different people’s lives, and how it changes them individually, as well as how it brings them together.

What I liked:

I love “books for book lovers,” as I call them. These are books where the characters truly love reading and literature.

The audio is phenomenal. This is a perfect example of how to do an epistolary well, in audio form. There were four different narrators and that makes all the difference. Epistolaries, in my humble opinion, can get very confusing, very quickly.

Having different narrators helps the listener-reader differentiate between the letter writers. Bonus too, that they had accents that corresponded with the area of the world they came from. Very nice.

What I didn’t love:

The ending felt very rushed. I won’t give spoilers, but there was so much build-up to the ending and it felt like it just rushed to reach a resolution. I wanted to know more about the romance that featured so prominently in the lost manuscript.

Plot: 4.0
Characters: 3.5
Performance: 5.0

Thank you, Netgalley, for the opportunity to listen to "The Lost Manuscript."

This was a completely delightful yet poignant story. The narration was perfect and made it easy to keep the characters straight. The overarching mystery of the manuscript was wonderful and so fun for book lovers and anyone who has ever felt connected to or changed by a book. The characters felt so distinct and full, even though we only got to know them through letter. This book was exactly what I needed for the times right now.

Anne-Lise Briard finds a manuscript of a book in the nightstand of her room as she stays in Brittany at the Beau Rivage Hotel. Since she is an avid reader, she immediately reads the manuscript. She notices that the original author did not finish the book, but it was finished by another author. The book moved her very deeply, and she just has to know the story behind it. Anne-Lise begins her search.

Oh, I love this book! Written completely in letters, it is through correspondences that we follow the plot. Not only is it a fun mystery with amazingly real characters, but it shows the reader something I, as an avid reader, already know so well: a book can affect a reader very, very profoundly! As Anne-Lise digs into the history of the book, she makes friends along the way. Books also have the power to bind people together!

Netgalley gave me a free audio version of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. The audio version is wonderfully done with great actors from the countries that their characters are from, making this book even more real!

Book Trigger warnings: brief discussion of a past rape.

The lost manuscript is a story of Annaliese, who finds a 30 y.o. lost manuscript and is able to reconnect it to its original author, Sylveste, only to find out that someone else along the way wrote the ending. Together, they backtrack through 30 years of readers who have been touched by the love story.

This is an epistolary novel. There are definitely ups and downs to using this style of writing. I think having it in an audiobook form with different voices really helped to bring the story to life as much as possible. Even so, while I think it was pretty well written, it’s hard to really capture some of the events of the story and I found myself wishing it was in a normal novel form (maybe with interspersed letters) more than once. The pacing was good and there were definitely moments I enjoyed in the story.

While I liked all the characters alright, I found myself struggling to connect to them with the exceptions of a couple minor characters and Sylveste. The plot is somewhat formulaic, but for a largely feel-good story that doesn’t really bother me. Overall, it was an enjoyable read, but nothing particularly poignant or special to me. If it sounds like something that’s up your alley though and you need to fill a few hours. This one will do the trick.