The Memory Palace: Edward Hollis - Softcover

Rich and poetic, this is the kind of non-fiction that makes fiction seem predictable, thin and uncurious. --Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

As with his first book, The Secret Lives of Buildings, Hollis proves a refreshing thinker. He reaches beyond aesthetics and into more unusual territory. The Memory Palace houses a great deal of thought expressed in succinct asides that punctuate the storytelling. --Daily Telegraph

Hollis gives us some brilliant illuminations: the chapter on Versailles is a wonderful fusion of physical and metaphysical descriptions whose combinations of distinct facts and elegantly wrought fictions are hypnotic. Hollis tempts us, charmingly, to remember the art of remembering. --Independent

Defiantly uncategorisable and nuanced... On the surface, The Memory Palace is a literary cabinet of curiosities: a collection of fabulous objects and eccentric interiors, many now lost. With a poet's sensibility and a historian's delight, Hollis elegantly uncovers how we use objects and space to define ourselves through memory. --'Books of the Year', The Sunday Times

Hollis gives us some brilliant illuminations: the chapter on Versailles is a wonderful fusion of physical and metaphysical descriptions whose combinations of distinct facts and elegantly wrought fictions are hypnotic. Hollis tempts us, charmingly, to remember the art of remembering. --Independent

'With a poet's sensibility and a historian's delight, Hollis elegantly uncovers a literary cabinet of curiosities' --Paperback review, Sunday Times

'The Memory Palace is a meticulous and often surprisingly touching history of how certain interiors became 'lost' to us through time' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

'Intriguing... A quasi-sequel to his successful debut, The Secret Lives of Buildings. The Memory Palace is an idiosyncratic approach which] unearths rich pickings' --Paperback review, Independent

'The Memory Palace is a meticulous and often surprisingly touching history of how certain interiors became 'lost' to us through time' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

'Idiosyncratic... Hollis is a refreshing thinker, examining how buildings are not only structures that architects make, but also whatever the rest of us come to make of them too' --Paperback review, Daily Telegraph

'The Memory Palace is a meticulous and often surprisingly touching history of how certain interiors became 'lost' to us through time' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

'Ambitious... This book makes you think anew about how the way we arrange our rooms reflects our inner lives - you'll certainly never watch Grand Designs the same way again' --Paperback review, Independent on Sunday

'The Memory Palace is a meticulous and often surprisingly touching history of how certain interiors became 'lost' to us through time' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

'Hollis follows a loose chronology that brings the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey. The book itself is a cabinet of curiosities, in which the historical and imaginary, the personal and philosophical, are interweaved' --Paperback review, Irish Times

'The Memory Palace is a meticulous and often surprisingly touching history of how certain interiors became 'lost' to us through time' --Paperback review, Sunday Herald

The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives and become the backdrop to our sense of self. One day, the houses will be gone, but even then, traces of the stories and the memories they contained will remain. In this dazzling work of imaginative re-construction, Edward Hollis takes us to the sites of five great spaces now lost to history and pieces together the fragments he finds there to re-create their vanished chambers. From Rome's Palatine to the old Palace of Westminster and the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and from the sets of the MGM studios in Hollywood to the pavilions of the Crystal Palace and his own grandmother's sitting room, The Memory Palace is a glittering treasure trove of luminous forgotten places and the people who, for a short time, made them their home.