Love Notes from a German Building Site

Author(s): Adrian Duncan

Location(s): Berlin

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Contemporary - 2010s

Paul, a young Irish engineer, follows Evelyn to Berlin and begins work on the renovation of a commercial building in Alexanderplatz. Wrestling with a new language, on a site running behind schedule, and with a relationship in flux, he becomes increasingly untethered.
Set against the structural evolution of a sprawling city, this meditation on language, memory and yearning is underpinned by the site’s physical reality. As the narrator explores the mind’s fragile architecture, he begins to map his own strange geography through a series of notebooks, or ‘Love notes’.
Paul’s story will speak to anyone who has known what it is to be in love, or exiled, or simply alone.

‘Love Notes from a German Building Site is a strange, oblique, haunted work of quiet meditative intelligence … some of the finest writing on love I’ve read in recent memory.’ —Rob Doyle

‘With elegance and precision, this beautiful book shows the forces that act on the structures of buildings and those that impact on relationships.’ – Wendy Erskine

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