The Book of Lost Hours

In 1938 Nuremberg, Jewish clockmaker and timekeeper Ezekiel Levy senses imminent danger as violence swells outside. He opens a hidden doorway using an ancestral pocket watch and pushes his daughter, Lisavet Levy, into a tunnel through Time, promising to return after finding his son, Klaus. The door vanishes, leaving Lisavet trapped in a vast library-like “time space” of endless shelves where leather-bound books contain human memories. She does not hunger or truly sleep, and after weeks of searching she realizes there is no obvious exit.

Lisavet encounters strange inhabitants: an irritable specter who warns that most beings there are dead and that the whispering presence called Time is dangerous, and a robed, self-possessed figure who identifies himself as Azrael, the first timekeeper, now “Forgotten.” Azrael teaches Lisavet to “time-walk” by stepping into memory-books as an unseen observer. Lisavet learns timekeepers can erase people and events by burning memory-books, and she witnesses a Nazi timekeeper destroy a volume and escape through a door using Ezekiel’s familiar pocket watch, tying her father’s fate to the war over memory.

Years pass inside the time space. By the mid-1940s Lisavet has grown up among other people’s lives, learning languages and hiding from timekeepers who burn books. She begins salvaging scorched pages from destroyed volumes, tucking them into what remains of Ezekiel’s memory-book. Azrael explains that erasure does not simply delete a story; it reshapes history around the missing pieces, making the erased “Forgotten” as the world rewrites itself to accommodate the gap. The time space becomes dominated by uniformed men—Nazis at first, then increasingly Russians and Americans.

Lisavet’s isolation shifts when she discovers a new change in herself: after years of only observing, she can suddenly affect objects inside memories. The first time she knocks over a cup in a French salon memory, she panics, fearing she is becoming something else—perhaps dying, perhaps trapped like Azrael. She also begins longing for real intimacy after watching a couple’s tenderness in a moonlit field memory. In 1946 she meets a living American timekeeper, Ernest Duquesne, whose presence feels perilous and exhilarating. Ernest first seems unusually merciful—stamping out flames to save a memory—yet when he confronts Lisavet, he steals the pages she rescued, leaving behind a blue leather book cover. The encounter plants both desire and mistrust.

In 1947–49, Lisavet and Ernest repeatedly collide and then choose each other. Ernest is working for the CIA-linked Time-Related Program (TRP) under director Jack Dillinger, who orders Ernest to track the mysterious “German girl,” seize her growing book of saved pages, or drag her out for interrogation. Ernest wavers as Lisavet argues that no government should decide what deserves to survive and that ordinary moments matter as much as official “importance.” Their connection deepens when a Russian timekeeper attacks and shoots at them; Ernest takes a bullet meant for Lisavet. Lisavet time-walks them into a wartime medical memory to improvise surgery and save him, then shows him a preserved memory of her parents’ first date in Geneva, underscoring how much of Ezekiel’s life has already been burned away.

Ernest and Lisavet fall in love despite the mission between them. Lisavet learns to touch Ernest, proving she is not merely a ghost, and Ernest develops a theory—“temporal departure”—that her body and consciousness have become untethered after years inside Time, making her unusually “solid” within memories. Their intimacy culminates in a 1949 jazz club memory and then a moonlit field as they finally act on their feelings. Immediately afterward, Lisavet touches the luminous “recent memories” drifting from Ernest and sees Jack’s demand that Ernest deliver her. Forced into truth, Ernest confesses he was sent to steal her book and may be ordered to drag her out. He chooses Lisavet, returns the book, and decides to lie by reporting her dead.

In 1950 Ernest brings Lisavet a recovered treasure: Ezekiel’s pocket watch, still capable of opening doors out of the time space, and a small revolver for protection. Lisavet experiments with her growing power and discovers something terrifying: if she fully inserts herself into a memory so that people and animals can touch and speak to her, the source book disintegrates afterward. Entering a memory “too fully” can change Time and destroy recorded history. She vows to stop, but her earlier interventions have consequences she cannot control.

Lisavet, now hunted, discovers she is pregnant with Ernest’s child. She gives birth inside a hospital memory and tries to bring the baby back to the time space, only to face an immediate impossibility: the infant is fully physical and hungry, while food taken from memories does not nourish her, and Lisavet’s milk fails. Desperate, Lisavet rewrites the past to save her daughter by placing the baby into Ernest’s sister Elaina Duquesne’s life on the night Elaina’s own newborn is about to die. Lisavet helps Elaina name the child Amelia and swaps her into the nursery, rewriting the cradle plate. The act tears open a vast whispering chasm in the time space as shelves collapse into dust—evidence of damaged histories. A Russian timekeeper steals Lisavet’s precious memory-book, including her preserved pages and her hidden record of Ernest. In 1952, Jack Dillinger and American timekeepers finally capture Lisavet and sedate her, sealing her out of the time space.

Lisavet wakes in a guarded psychiatric facility in Washington, DC. Jack interrogates her about Ernest, her abilities, and the baby, then breaks her by forcing her to confront the Holocaust and Klaus’s death. During a supervised outing Lisavet discovers she can stop Time itself, freezing rain and motion—a power that makes Jack both fearful and greedy. He compels her to erase an innocent captive’s memories into a black notebook and threatens that her daughter may be found. Offering conditional “freedom,” Jack forces Lisavet to erase her old life and take a new identity as Moira Donnelly, installing her as his secretary inside the TRP.

In 1955–59, Moira is used to erase knowledge and control staff, while navigating escalating coercion. Ernest reappears in her orbit, grieving family losses and raising Amelia, and their connection rekindles in secret. Meanwhile Ernest quietly resists Jack by sparing memories he is ordered to burn. Through Azrael’s intermediating presence in the time space, Ernest begins clandestine cooperation with Russian dissenter Vasily Stepanov. When Jack captures Vasily in 1958, Vasily hints that Lisavet’s child may still exist “out of Time.” Moira, panicked at any search that could expose Amelia, stops Time and kills Vasily. In 1959, when Ernest’s suspicions about missing timekeepers sharpen, Jack orders Moira to erase Lisavet Levy from Ernest’s mind again. Amelia, however, retains memories Moira tries to remove, suggesting she is becoming resistant to temporal manipulation. To protect Ernest and Amelia, Moira ends her relationship with Ernest by lying and then blackmails Jack into promoting her and relocating the TRP to New York while exiling Ernest to Boston.

By 1965 Boston, teenage Amelia Duquesne—raised believing Ernest was her uncle—receives Ernest’s watch after his apparent death and is coerced by Moira into timekeeping. Amelia enters the time space, meets Azrael, and encounters Anton Stepanov, Vasily’s son, alive and solid within the stacks. Anton possesses the battered dark-blue, flower-stamped memory-book Lisavet once filled with rescued pages. As Amelia’s pursuit and the time space’s crumbling chasm endanger her, Moira reveals fragments of the truth while Jack tightens control and uses Amelia as bait to capture Anton. Anton time-walks Amelia into an 1843 memory and gives proof that Ernest led a memory-saving resistance, contradicting the official narrative.

A federal raid destroys James Gravel’s pawnshop after Amelia’s contact, and when Jack arrives to seize control, Amelia’s fear triggers temporal departure: Time freezes, leaving only Amelia and Moira moving. Moira kills Fred Vance, disarms Jack, and traps Amelia inside the time space to force her toward Anton and the book, then resumes Time and executes Jack Dillinger. Amelia, stranded, bonds with Anton as he reveals his childhood losses and that stolen watches are hidden in the chasm. Together they enter Lisavet’s book and witness the buried history of Lisavet and Ernest.

Moira, now fully revealed as Lisavet, reunites with Ernest in New York; Ernest has regained the memories she erased after finding her book and confronts her. He admits he is the rebel leader stealing TRP watches to dismantle government control of the time space, and Lisavet chooses to protect him. Their fragile alliance fractures when Ernest develops a radical theory that the chasm may be a passage to alternate histories and plans a final sacrifice to seal the time space from interference. Both parents enter the time space as Amelia learns the chasm exists because Lisavet rewrote the past to save her.

In the time space, Lisavet stops Ernest from sacrificing himself by enlisting a furious Anton, then forces Amelia away by pushing her into the chasm with Ezekiel’s pocket watch. Lisavet makes her own sacrifice: she alters the origin of the time space by targeting Azrael’s past, killing his living self before his secrets can be extracted, so the time space’s curated archive can never be used as a weapon again. The shelves splinter and collapse as history rewrites itself.

Amelia lands back in 1965 Boston in a rewritten life where Ernest is her father and Lisavet her mother. Her memories split and reconcile as she tests the pocket watch and finds the time space transformed into a boundless, whispering realm of free, shifting memory rather than a controlled library. Choosing stability over obsession, Amelia closes the door on it and begins adapting to her new reality—starting with an early, gentler friendship with a different-version Anton at school.