Hayley Gelfuso’s The Book of Lost Hours Is the September GMA Book Club Pick (Exclusive)

Good Morning America’s September book club pick is here!

On Aug. 26, the morning news program announced that their latest selection for the GMA Book Club is The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso. 

The novel interweaves the stories of two women whose lives have been touched by a magical library known as the time space that houses the memories of people who have died.

Lisavet Levy is 11 years old in 1938, when she’s left behind in the library after her watchmaker father disappears. When Lisavet learns that government officials are attempting to destroy the library’s books, in order to rewrite the history the library contains, she embarks on a journey that may alter the time space entirely.

In 1965, teenager Amelia Duquesne, who lost her uncle, an American spy named Ernest, is approached by a CIA agent, who asks her to help track down a book of memories that Ernest was always after. When she enters the time space, however, Amelia realizes just how much the past and truth collide.

In an exclusive video shared with PEOPLE, Gelfuso shares why writing a history-focused novel, which has been described as being for fans of Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, was so important.

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“I chose to write about the way that we remember history because memory, to me, is something that is both very fragile but also extremely powerful,” the author explains. “It’s something that can be distorted and erased, and yet it’s also what ties us together across the generations.”

Centering Lisavet and Amelia’s stories across different eras was also important for the author to showcase the humanity behind historical time periods.

“History, it isn’t just events — It’s the stories that we tell, it’s the stories that survive.” Felfuso says. “And sometimes it’s also the stories that we don’t tell, and the stories that get silenced.”

“In this book, I really wanted to explore that tension and look at how remembering can be an act of resistance and how the stories that we tell each other shape not only our sense of the past but also the kind of future that we can imagine for ourselves.”

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Gelfuso is also a poet, whose writing is “rooted in real world history and science.” The Book of Lost Hours is her first novel.

The Book of Lost Hours is now available from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, wherever books are sold.