I was writing a novel and spend 3 hours typing 5 new pages and find they have been deleted. Can they be found and added back to my original book
If you haven’t closed the document, see if Edit | Undo - or Ctrl+Z - helps.
spend 3 hours typing 5 new pages
The word processor software’s equivalent to insert a new paper on a typewriter is to store a file with a new version number (using a MyBook-<date>-v# versioning scheme myself and creating backups of all these files.)
> Can they be found and added back to my original book
No.