MATTHEW HOOTON Everything Lost, Everything Found. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Longlisted for the 2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize, Matthew Hooton’s novel traces memories of Henry Ford’s experimental settlement in Brazil.

I know my grandson, Nicholas, thinks of my personal history as an exaggeration or tall tale. And why shouldn’t he? He cannot smell the leaf rot after each seasonal flooding, the fish-tank reek as the tributaries dried and islands formed, nor hear the utter cacophony of parrot and monkey chatter from the palm and rubber trees.

Jack has been back in Muskinaw, Michigan, for seven decades, but still he is haunted by the terrible death of his mother and the ensuing madness of his father, by the jungle that surrounded Fordlandia, and by all he experienced as a young boy in the few years that he lived with his parents in Henry Ford’s doomed rubber plantation experiment in Brazil.

‘We lived,’ he remembers, ‘in a sort of Midwestern dream’: a town in the middle of the jungle with asphalt streets, white brick bungalows with running water, and a sanatorium.

But the experience of Fordlandia lives inside me still, where it grows and wraps around my organs, creeping beneath my wrinkled skin – a physical religious conversion that has never properly faded … so there is always a green tendril tugging at me, and I fear that I am never truly here.

Memories haunt him – ‘visitations’, ‘ghosts perhaps’. At night in Muskinaw he hears ‘the impossible scraping of bat wings’ along his bedroom windowsill, or ‘catches a whiff of [his] mother’s cold cream’ and of her Craven A cigarettes.

Gracie [his wife] once told me that I was disproportionally haunted, that it seemed I had been assigned too many spectres, and that perhaps there had been some sort of mistake in the afterlife: a doubling up on a work order. We laughed at the time, but she wasn’t wholly wrong.

Gracie, to Jack’s distress, is currently in a hospice, suffering from the permanent disabling effects of treatment for cancer. Jack’s vivid memories are part of his grief at not being able to look after her, and his growing awareness of his own age, especially when he forgets to unplug kitchen sink, floods the house, and slips and falls hurrying to turn off the tap, badly bruising his hip.

Jack has every reason to be haunted by his past. We know from the horrifying Prologue to Everything Lost, Everything Found that his mother bled to death after losing her arm to a caiman in the River Tapajós in Brazil. Jack’s memories then skip back to the family’s arrival by steamship at the growing Brazilian township of Fordlandia, to the dug-out canoes and small craft of the fishermen and fruit-sellers who greet them, and the assortment of people on the dock, which includes a Portuguese priest, Ford’s managerial contingent in beige linen suits, women in red dresses with parasols who will travel upstream to a tavern not allowed in Fordlandia, some men his father calls ‘boom-town seekers and would-be adventurers’, and two men wearing light-coloured suits, highly polished shoes and hats pulled down over their eyes, who watch everything from the edge of the crowd. This is Jack’s first sight of some of Ford’s ‘morality agents’ – men employed to enforce Ford’s strict morality rules, which they sometimes do with armed violence. ‘Ford’s secret police’, Jack’s father calls them.

Jack’s father has worked his way up through Ford’s car manufacturing empire in Muskinaw and has been given a two-year contract as managerial assistant to the foreman of Ford’s Brazilian rubber plantation. He shows Jack around the plantation where the trees, unlike those in the jungle, are planted in strict rows, attended by American and native employees, and are doomed to failure from insect attacks, fungal blight and exposure to fierce sunlight. Beyond the trees, the jungle is being cleared, and as Jack’s father explains ‘burn-off’ and planting techniques to him, ‘a screaming parrot burst flaming from the surrounding trees’ and flies so close to Jack that he smells the ‘lit-paper acidity of charred feathers’. It is one of the images that will haunt Jack, and he likens it to old age, in which ‘we are all slowly burning’, and to life in which ‘everything moves and changes’.

After the horror of his mother’s death, his father becomes obsessed with hunting down the caiman that took her arm and with it the wedding ring that had belonged to his own mother. He disappears for days at a time, leaving 12-year-old Jack to fend for himself. Jack finds solace for his own grief and trauma doing routine laundry work in the sanatorium. There he becomes friends with Soo, a young Korean girl who slowly reveals how her family fled from Korea when the Japanese invaded. She tells him, too, that her family are direct descendents of a shamanistic group whose princess is well known in Korean legend and that the Japanese are still hunting them down to destroy them. Soo is a princess of that group, and her ‘aunt’, who is in Fordlandia with her, is not a relative but a shaman, there to protect her.

It is a strange story and when Ford’s morality agents turn up looking for two ‘Oriental terrorists’, Jack wonders if what she has told him is true. But he sees Soo’s aunt violently captured and knows Soo must flee into the jungle to escape. He goes with her, determined to find the river tavern where he believes his missing father is known and will help them.

On a maze of tapper trails, they happen on a disturbing native ceremony for the dead, a strange armed child who points them in a direction that may be wrong, and an American girl Jack had met once when he shadowed his father along the river, got lost, and came across her uncle’s secret Confederate refuge. Aware of the danger from insects, vampire bats, snakes and jaguars, and not knowing whether they are lost or not, they are constantly afraid. They do get to the tavern and Jack’s father does turn up to help them, but what happens next is terrifying and results in something that Jack keeps secret for the rest of his life.

Jack remembers all this vividly while trying to deal with Gracie’s dying. His grandson Nick takes time off from his college courses to ferry Jack between the home he and Gracie have always lived in and the hospice where Gracie is being cared for. At times she is alert and she and Jack share memories and jokes, but frequently she is asleep, and there are increasingly times when she fails to recognise Jack.

Jack and Nick have an easy relationship with each other, but Jack’s interactions with his daughter, Jess, are strained. Gracie, when she is awake and alert, is determined to heal this rift, and Jack too tries hard to make amends for what he sees as his constant ‘absences’ – real and psychological. An old game from Jess’s childhood – ‘Once Upon a Time’, in which each finishes the sentence with an imagined story – sparks shared happy memories, but Jess is too worried about her mother and about Jack’s increasing need for help for it to solve things quickly.

There is constant pressure on Jack to move out of his house to somewhere ‘safer’, which Jack resists, because his home is the place filled with memories of Gracie and also, as he admits to himself, out of his own pride, stubbornness and fear of change. The physiotherapist he sees for his bruised hip is blunt with him:

‘Jack, I need you to see that where you live is a health issue. A matter of safety and of prolonging your life. If you fall again, you might not be so lucky.’

Lucky. Never been my favourite word. ‘Right.’

‘I’m not your doctor, but I can tell you that your odds of surviving a fracture are low – especially if it’s a femur or your pelvis.’

I nodded. She was right. Which was annoying. And made for a difficult exit. ‘Okay, I hear you. Give an old man a minute, though.’

Small changes in his renovated kitchen, however, make it seem strange and unfamiliar, and an episode in which the painkillers for his hip impair his judgement frightens him and Jess. So, he begins to accept that change must come.

Something Lost, Something Found is beautifully written. Things which sound unbelievable when described in a review are so easily made part of Jack’s story that they are readily accepted, and many of these things, such as the existence of the Korean shamanic group, and the horrors enforced by Henry Ford on his workforce, are based on fact. Matthew Hooton brings the jungle and Jack’s experience of it to life, but he also handles Jack’s age, his interactions with his grandson, his daughter, and especially with Gracie, with beautiful empathy and love. And the distancing effect of the ‘Once Upon a Time’ story in the final pages of the book makes for a moving and satisfying ending.

This is a remarkable book by a master storyteller.

Matthew Hooton Everything Lost, Everything Found Fourth Estate 2025 PB 304pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy Everything Lost, Everything Found from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: ARA Historical Novel Prize, Brazil, Fordlandia, Henry Ford, historical fiction, Matthew | Hooton, memory, rubber plantations