Landauer House: a glass-walled modernist villa in Czechoslovakia, designed as a monument to clarity, openness and the new century.

Around it gather marriage, betrayal, occupation, exile, confiscation, memory, and the slow corrosion of idealism by politics. Mawer uses the house beautifully: not just as setting, but as a kind of moral and aesthetic machine. Glass promises transparency, but everyone inside it remains opaque to one another.

The book moves through Europe before, during and after the Second World War, with modernist design, Jewish identity, sexuality, class, and the violence of occupation all refracted through the rooms of a building that outlasts its owners. For readers of Penelope Fitzgerald, W. G. Sebald in a more narrative mode, Ian McEwan’s historical novels, or fiction interested in art, architecture and the ruins of the twentieth century.

Little, Brown hardback edition, first published in Great Britain in 2009; reprinted twice in 2009. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. Good second-hand condition with light shelfwear and page toning.