I was quite surprised to find this book getting some lousy ratings when I looked it up on Amazon as I really enjoyed it. It’s subtitled “The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House” and I think it manages to tell that story nicely. It’s not how to find out the history of your own house and it is a story - don’t read it if you wouldn’t normally read a novel.

I thought the stuff about the author’s own life (for example her thinking about all the houses that she’d lived in and what happened there) and her family (for example the reactions of her own children to finding out about and in some cases meeting people who have lived in their house) were great additions to the story of the house itself. In many cases Myerson expands on the facts that she’s discovering by inventing tales about the previous residents (embellishing facts rather than inventing I suppose) and I thought these bits worked well. It could have turned out to be a dull parade of facts about a house but it wasn’t.