The Memory Palace | Granta

  • Published: 05/09/2013
  • ISBN: 9781846274954
  • Granta Books
  • 368 pages

The Memory Palace

Edward Hollis

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.

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

Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

[A] wonderful fusion of physical and metaphysical descriptions whose combinations of distinct facts and elegantly wrought fictions are hypnotic... Brilliant

Jay Merrick, Independent

Hollis is a refreshing thinker. He reaches beyond aesthetics and into more unusual territory

Thomas Marks, Daily Telegraph

The Author

Born in London in 1971, Edward Hollis studied Architecture at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh before joining a practice, working first on ruins and follies in the coastal lagoons of Sri Lanka and then on Victorian villas, old breweries and town halls in Scotland. He now teaches Interior Design at Edinburgh College of Art. The Secret Lives of Buildings was his first book.

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From the Same Author

The Secret Lives Of Buildings

Edward Hollis

The plans are drawn up, a site is chosen, foundations are dug: a building comes into being with the expectation that it will stay put and stay for ever. But a building is a capricious thing: it is inhabited and changed, and its existence is a tale of constant and curious transformation. In this radical reimagining of architectural history, Edward Hollis tells the stories of thirteen buildings, beginning with the ‘once upon a time’ when they first appeared, through the years of appropriation, ruin and renovation, and ending with a temporary ‘ever after’. In spell-binding prose, Hollis follows his buildings through time and space to reveal the hidden histories of the Parthenon and the Alhambra, Gloucester Cathedral and Haghia Sofia, Sans Souci and Notre Dame de Paris, Malatesta’s Tempio and Loreto, and explores landmarks of our own time, from Hulme’s legendary crescents to the Berlin Wall and the fibre-glass theme parks of Las Vegas.