The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the west but looking east, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. … Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.