Edward Hollis’s The Secret Lives of Buildings might easily be mistaken for an ordinary book on the history of architecture: a conventional grand tour from Gloucester Cathedral to the Vegas Strip by way of the Alhambra, with a few asides thrown in on the vagaries of historical preservation and the viscidities of architectural taste. But what it is, in fact, is an unusual sort of speculative history, almost a work of experimental fiction. The buildings, which are its nominal subjects, are only MacGuffins on which Hollis hangs a series of short stories on the themes of love, loss and time.

In 13 chapters nosing around one world site or other, Hollis creates a fantasia from the real and the imagined. He gives dialogue to conquerors and builders, imagining how Frederick the Great must have mused on his Sanssouci Palace; he even gives voice to buildings themselves, as Turkish haremites huddling in a shelled-out Parthenon become the temple’s speaking memory. The secrets aren’t really secret (Venice’s Basilica di San Marco is a pastiche of plunder, Notre Dame is a 19th-century fake), but Hollis makes them feel like they are. His revelations and scenes aren’t architectural but human – the awe of the Islamic host first entering Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia, or the sense of history mixed with the irony of a Chinese functionary as he signs away an ancient city to Western developers.

Hollis is an architect and preservationist by trade, and this is his first book. For his second he would do well to cut away some of the fat that surrounds the unique historical poetics at the heart of his Secret Lives. Without the extraneous preambles that frame every chapter, and minus some of the excesses of its too-often-intemperate prose, we could almost take this book for a minor work of W.G. Sebald.

Ian Volner