The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors
Product Description
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.
Review
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
About the Author
Born in London in 1970, EDWARD HOLLIS studied Architecture at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh before joining a practice, working first on ruins and follies in Sri Lanka and then on villas, breweries and town halls in Scotland. He teaches at Edinburgh College of Art and his first book, The Secret Lives of Buildings, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2010.
