The American playwright and screenwriter Alice Austen has set her superb debut novel in a Brussels apartment block which she herself once inhabited. While she lived there, elderly women confided memories of residents of the building during the Nazi occupation. Behind its magnificent Haussmannesque facade, painters, intellectuals, art collectors and dealers – some of Jewish descent – had all flourished. Drawing on her personal experiences of these tragic spaces, Austen has composed a powerful historical novel, set just before and during the Nazi occupation. Beautifully written, the narrative stands as a great humanist statement.

Each chapter is narrated by a resident of the building. ‘I’m an architect,’ announces one of these, Francois Sauvin. ‘I deal with form and structure.’ Austen does the same. If I ever visit 33 Place Brugmann, I shall know my way around. The structure that houses her characters feels lived-in and substantial, the site of a complex system of connection, separation, affection, suspicion and hostility. 

The building emerges primarily as a soundscape. Francois’s daughter Charlotte, an eighteen-year-old student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, is awoken by pounding on the door. Masha, a Russian Jewish émigrée and sempstress living in a cramped fifth-floor maid’s room, begins her narrative: ‘Listen.’ We obey.