In a unique collaboration between Artangel and Living Architecture, a dwelling was built on top of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The dwelling was a boat, Roi de Belges, inspired by the Thames and by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Writers and artists were given short residencies and wrote about the strange experience of staying in a boat overlooking the river. This book, a collection of their pieces responding to Conrad’s masterpiece, is a result of that collaboration.

From Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s meditation on belonging, identity and the otherness of London to Michael Ondaatje’s piercing reflections on history and literature, via Jeanette Winterson’s lyrical, impressionistic musings and Caryl Philips’s supple and poetic observations, this is Joseph Conrad, the Thames and the capital city as you have never experienced them before.