These Dividing Walls: Shortlisted for the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award

What building doesn't have secrets? How much does anyone know of what goes on behind their neighbour's doors? On a hot June day, grief-stricken Edward arrives in Paris hoping that a stay in a friend's empty apartment will help him mend. But this is not the Paris he knows: there are no landmarks or grand boulevards, and the apartment he was promised is little more than an attic room. In the apartments below him, his new neighbours fill their flats with secrets. A young mother is on the brink, a bookshop owner buries her past, and a banker takes up a dark and malicious new calling. Before he knows it, Edward will find himself entangled in their web, and as the summer heat intensifies so do tensions within and without the building, leading to a city-wide wave of violence, and a reckoning within the walls of number 37.