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. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell - a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift - becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as ...