ACL Grid: 8 mins, Meta: 30 minutes (on-and-off) 
[4.19 avg; 8 ratings] rate it
Happy new year! Ben here with the first selection from Ariadne’s Crossword Library for 2026. And we start the year with a guest constructor: Hannah Binney, returning with a puzzle entitled “Are You Missing Something?”. (For those keeping score, Hannah also constructed the June puzzle of 2025.) The prompt: The meta answer is a five-word book title which may describe how you find yourself after solving this puzzle’s grid. Let’s get started on the grid…
Well, this is interesting. As I’m working my way around the grid, I’m finding the long entries hard to fill in. But the crosses seem OK. As I’m finishing 21A, I think I see the mechanism: letters needed to make sense of the across clues have been dropped.
- 21A {Book opening} = CHAP(T)ERONE
- 31A {Front of house supervisors} = HEADWA(I)TERS
- 41A {“Sorry, my schedule is full”} = ICANT(M)AKEIT
- 52A {Strength exercises with an ursine name} = B(E)ARCRAWLS
OK, so that gives us TIME. But we’re after a five-word book title. Presumably, TIME is one of those; but how to derive the rest? Presumably from the puzzle title, prompt, and mechanism. TIME DROP? MISSED TIME? LOST TIME? And then how might I describe myself after solving the grid? Perhaps MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME? While there are book titles of that name, none are by anyone I’ve heard of before. So I’ll put that in the “possible” box.
Let’s take another look at the grid, and see if there are any additional hints…
- 47D {Author Joanne of the cozy mystery series} = FLUKE
Not an author I’ve heard of, but has she written a book with TIME in the title? No, she has not.
But that’s about all I can see in the grid. So I go back to the previous idea and google “lost time book title” and up pops a far more likely title: IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust. That fits with the prompt much better: after finishing the grid, I the solver, am searching for the letters of TIME, which have been lost. Nice one!
Congrats to Hannah on her second Ariadne appearance. And thanks to editor Emma Oxford for her literary yet fun meta puzzle series!
Puzzle: ACL; Rating: 4 stars
I was briefly slowed down by being more familiar with that work by the name “Remembrance of Things Past,” though Wikipedia implies that that’s the name of a play, not the original book. I got there in the end, though!
Puzzle: ACL; Rating: 2.5 stars
I stumbled on this one, because the link to the Proust title was rather tenuous in the grid (in my mind). I understood there was either missing time, or perhaps extra time, with the grid and clues. After doing some general internet searches of lists for books with time in the title the plausible ones that jumped out to me were:
You Have Time for This by Mark Budman or
In the Nick of Time (multiple books by multiple authors)
Each of these seemed slightly plausible, and I went with the last of them, thinking nick and steal are synonyms, which would be a hint to the missing time. A stretch, but seemingly as valid as ” In Search of Lost Time” which you either have to know the title or not, and are left trawling the internet for hints of potential books. I really don’t like these search engine heavy puzzles where there are multiple potential answers.