EVERYTHING LOST IS FOUND AGAIN

There were so many places where Will Mcgrath could have gone wrong with his memoir, Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho. After all, it’s the story of how he and his wife — a young white couple from the United States — lived for a year in a small African nation. His narrative could easily have devolved into a do-gooder story of the Great White Hope type; or a navel-gazing coming-of-age-in-an-exoticlocale confession.

But Everything Lost Is Found Again is neither of those. It is a wonderful book, keenly observed, a breezy, thought-provoking read in which Mcgrath and his wife, Ellen Block, live and work in this small country that hardly anyone has heard of. They throw themselves wholeheartedly into life in Lesotho — they make friends, work at their jobs, go to parties, take hikes, play with children and mourn the deaths of people they have grown to love. It is all so wonderfully normal. And it is all so wonderfully fascinating.