Everything Lost, Everything Found by Matthew Hooton

Matthew Hooton’s Everything Lost, Everything Found is a richly evocative and emotionally resonant novel that delicately weaves memory, history, and grief into a hauntingly lyrical narrative. Spanning continents and decades, this masterfully written work explores how the stories we carry—those passed down, inherited, or silently endured—shape not only our pasts but also our present selves.

The novel opens in 1929 with young Jack accompanying his parents to Fordlandia, the ill-fated rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, established by American industrialist Henry Ford. Hooton’s depiction of this lush, treacherous setting is as immersive as it is unsettling. The jungle pulses with life and danger, acting both as backdrop and metaphor for the uncontrollable forces Jack must navigate. A tragic accident robs Jack of his mother, and with it, his sense of stability. The loss is devastating, and Hooton renders it with a quiet intensity that lingers.

Decades later, we find Jack in the waning days of the 20th century, now elderly and living in Michigan’s decaying rust belt. As his wife slips into the fog of dementia, Jack’s own memories begin to rise, unbidden and insistent, blurring the line between past and present. Here, Hooton excels in capturing the emotional dissonance of aging and the simultaneous erosion and resurgence of memory, the aching desire to hold on to what is slipping away.

The dual timelines are handled with remarkable sensitivity, and Hooton’s prose remains elegant and restrained throughout. His treatment of grief is both immediate and long-endured and especially poignant. While the narrative is at times dense, and the scope ambitious, the novel maintains a steady emotional core. Themes of colonial ambition, familial rupture, and historical displacement thread throughout, offering insight without ever veering into didacticism.

The depiction of Fordlandia is a particular strength. Hooton not only illuminates a little-known chapter of American imperial enterprise but also captures the disorientation and wonder experienced by a child caught between cultures and crises. The interplay between natural and human threats such the predatory animals, the unrelenting climate, and the fragile politics of empire, underscores the novel’s central meditation on the unpredictability of life and loss.

Everything Lost, Everything Found is a poignant, gorgeously crafted novel that rewards patient reading. Hooton has written a deeply humane exploration of how the past imprints itself on the soul, and how, even in loss, something essential can still be recovered.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

HarperCollins