This is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin's Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes but also smaller domestic ones.

When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell - a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift - becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house's various inhabitants.

Paperback

Fitzcarraldo editions