The Tyranny Of Lost Things

By Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Sandstone, 320pp, £8.99

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a co-founder of the Vagenda blog and co-author of The Vagenda: A Zero Tolerance Guide To The Media . In The Tyranny of Lost

Things, university dropout Harmony returns to live in the house in which she spent her early years. Once a commune, it is now divided into flats, but it is here that Harmony hopes to reconnect with her past and the “lost things” that haunt her.

Cosslett paints a wide-ranging portrait of millennial London, contrasting it with the idealism of Harmony’s bohemian parents. At times, though, her characters feel like representatives of social types rather than fully realised individuals. When she’s freed from the journalist’s urge to summarise and explain, however, the writing becomes much more compelling, such as in the finely drawn free-love scene between Harmony’s father and another young woman.