Anyone familiar with the work of Patrick Modiano will know that Paris, birthplace of the flâneur and the situationist alike, is a city in which memory manifests topographically. Lauren Elkin’s first novel, Scaffolding, is alert to the ghosts that move among us. The Parisian landscape, the buildings within it and the material objects accumulated by their inhabitants are vessels and custodians of the past – and the voices of the dead. 

Anna, a Franco-American psychoanalyst, has moved into an apartment on the Rue de Belleville. Her husband, David, is living in London for work. Anna, who has been signed off from her job following a traumatising miscarriage, spends her days bingeing on Netflix, exercising and ruminating on the past, desire and