Love Notes from a German Building Site

Paul, an Irish engineer, moves to Berlin to renovate a commercial building in Alexanderplatz. He struggles with a new language, a site that's running behind schedule, and a changing relationship. This exploration of language, memory, and longing is set against the backdrop of the city's structural evolution. The narration explores the mind's fragile architecture, and Paul creates a map of his own strange geography through his notebooks, known as Love Notes. Duncan's account is a refreshing and tender perspective in a brutish and masculine environment. His prose is minimal but powerful, and his ideas are profound. If more men thought and wrote with the honesty and tenderness of Adrian Duncan, we would have stronger and more meaningful novels, and fewer garish monuments to consumerism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 204 pages
Publication date: 05 March 2020
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Paul, a young Irish engineer, follows his girlfriend to Berlin and begins work on the renovation of a commercial building in Alexanderplatz. Wrestling with a new language, on a site running behind schedule, and with a relationship in flux, he becomes increasingly untethered. Set against the structural evolution of a sprawling city, this meditation on language, memory and yearning is underpinned by the site's physical reality. As the narration explores the mind's fragile architecture, he begins to map his own strange geography through a series of notebooks, or 'Love notes'. 'In such a brutish and masculine atmosphere, Duncan's account is an unmasked ray of hope... The prose is minimal, yet the ideas are maximal. If more men thought and wrote as tenderly and honestly as Adrian Duncan, we'd have stronger, sturdier novels and fewer garish monuments to consumerism' Irish Independent.

Weight: 162g
Dimension: 129 x 198 x 11 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781789546262