The Rooms

Iris arrives in Brussels to embark on a research fellowship at a prestigious institute. Fleeing the disintegration of her twenty-year marriage in Amsterdam, she delves into the life of a nineteenth century Belgian art patron and mycologist about whom she wants to curate a biographical period room.

Making new encounters and reconnecting with old friends, she embraces this new chapter, but as she delves into her research and walks the streets of Brussels, the ghosts of her past come and go in waves, triggering increasing anxiety about how to navigate the second half of her life. When Paula, a charismatic urban ecologist storms into her life, Iris feels she can begin to project herself more confidently into the future, however much she feels the pull of a city whose history and architecture come to act as a mirror of the tremors of her body and mind.

Interspersed by a series of walks that intertwine the colonial past and ecological future of a city that is revealed to the reader layer after layer, The Rooms is a beautifully original take on the messy business of entering middle-age at this point in the 21st Century.