It is during the sleepless nights of your twenties that you form the books you will write. That is if you are a writer. If you are not a writer, or an artist, how will the sleepless nights of your twenties affect you later?

In the micro stories of Lost Words, Xavier Hennekinne’s narrator takes us on a reflective journey from his entranced yet perplexed youth in France to sleepless nights as a contemporary parent. This compelling voyage through time and mood is accompanied by images by Phil Day. Just as the prose entwines us in its subtle recurring rhythms, the prints and drawings are never literal, taking ordinary objects but revealing their sinuous shapes out of dark and suggestive structures.

Praise for Lost Words

‘Lost Words is an unusual book…Hennekinne’s style is direct, witty, evocative and engaging.’

— Saturday Paper

An intriguing collaboration where words and pictures seem to travel in parallel, but intersect and connect while remaining true to their own essential threads.’

— Julian Davies, author of Call Me and Crow Mellow

‘Each of Hennekinne’s episodes is like a jump in time; a series of uncanny and neo-surreal moments that obsessively circle around each other. The pairing of Hennekinne’s writing with Phil Day’s prints and drawings is referenced in the Bachelard quote that serves as an epigraph for the book: ‘Only through reverie can unusual images be communicated’. This is perhaps best exemplified in witty moments such as where Day’s image of anthropomorphic jeans replete with teeth for a zip and fly, accompanies a vignette on an adolescent’s fixation on Spanish actress Victoria Abril. Lost Words is a Francophilean fantasy, where the haphazard, haunting and entropic are les choses de la vie.’

— Cassandra Atherton, poet and Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University