"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." —Sunday Times, Books of the Year
"Rich and poetic, this is the kind of non-fiction that makes fiction seem predictable, thin and uncurious." —Scotsman
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.
