The Room of Lost Steps
Lake Union Publishers – October 2025
THE PALACE AT THE END OF THE SEA (June 2025) and upcoming THE ROOM OF LOST STEPS (October 2025) by Simon Tolkien is a thrilling, epic duology that charts the impassioned coming-of-age of Theo Sterling, a young idealist who struggles to find himself in the midst of a world that seems to be spinning out of control.
In book one, we meet a young man who comes of age and crosses continents in search of an identity—and a cause—at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War in a thrilling, timely, and emotional historical saga.
New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling’s world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his parents: His father, a Jewish self-made businessman, refuses to give up on the American dream, and his mother, a refugee from religious persecution in Mexico, holds fast to her Catholic faith. When disaster strikes the family, Theo must learn who he is. A charismatic school friend and a firebrand girl inspire him to believe he can fight Fascism and change the world, but each rebellion comes at a higher price, forcing Theo to question these ideologies too. From New York’s Lower East Side to an English boarding school to an Andalusian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Theo’s harrowing journey from boy to man is set against a backdrop of societies torn apart from within, teetering on the edge of a terrible war to which Theo is compulsively drawn like a moth to a flame.
In the second novel, THE ROOM OF LOST STEPS, coming in late 2025, Tolkien concludes this sweeping saga, taking readers from Depression-era New York to an English boarding school and from revolutionary Barcelona to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, Theo’s journey takes him through poverty, grief, hollow ideologies, disillusionment, and eventual self-discovery. Zealously fighting Fascism—and struggling with the complexities of family, identity, first love, and war—Theo comes to understand more, and risk more, than he could ever have imagined.
