This is an extraordinary novel. It is fiction but it reads as if it is travel literature. It is packed with history from the Ancient Egyptians and Celts to the lives of present day refugees. It is a campervan trip across Europe and it is a story of a woman searching for answers. We begin with the unnamed narrator packing up her belongings into plastic crates ready to take a sabbatical. This is her own Lost Property. She buys a motorhome with Rupert and they set off across the channel and into France. Lost Property turns up as artifacts or stuff in the museums they visit. She meets characters from history and chats with them in the streets and in the van. Joan of Arc is here, French poet Christine de Pizan. In Ferrara we meet Ariosto who coined the term humanism. At times the narrator brings many characters together in an expansion of the dream dinner party idea. They explore nationalism and war and humanity. They drive through Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria, crossing borders to Greece where they work as volunteers at a refugee camp. At the end of the book she tries to sum up what she has learnt on her journey while sitting on a balcony overlooking a Greek harbour. She can feel the Englishness (as it has grown or adapted) of England pulling her home. She writes, 'The emotional response to a place, which is what nationalism depends on, is private. There's no commonality of experience ... a country is a kind of glacier, solid and always slowly moving and changing, while a nation is just a huge number of individual experiences of the glacier, jumbled together, under the assumption that they are the same. Which they aren't.' Her writing is never cliched, it is individual and interesting, her knowledge of historical figures is deep and I learnt a lot. This is both an enjoyable read and a book that activated parts of my brain that are often dormant. ( )