The ghost of Walter Benjamin scuds above this Berlin-set debut along with all the rest of the city's disturbing 20th-century history, but the shapes Aridjis draws remain maddeningly tantalising. Tatiana is drifting round Berlin trying to avoid an inevitable return to her claustrophobic Mexican-Jewish family. Meandering through dead-end jobs, uncomfortable flats and occasional casual sex, she is defiantly proud that a beggar and the voice of the S-Bahn announcer are her only points of human contact. From the opening flashback when she sees Hitler disguised as a woman to the unwelcoming Plattenbau estates of East Berlin and a party in a building with an underground bowling alley once used by the Gestapo or the Stasi, Tatiana's city is haunted by its history. A job transcribing notes for elderly historian Dr Weiss, clearly an acolyte of Benjamin, and her relationship with meteorologist Jonas, allows Aridjis to play with her cloudy psychogeography. But without her or Tatiana's familiarity with Berlin, the reader gets lost in the dense fog of allusion.

Tatiana, a young Jewish woman from Mexico, has spent the last few years moving between apartments in Berlin. She chooses a solitary life in her adopted city, walking the streets and transcribing tapes for the elderly Doktor Weiss, through whom she meets "ant illustrator turned meteorologist" Jonas. Growing up in East Berlin, the clouds were his escape from reality but, with Tatiana, Jonas begins to look below the ground as well as above it as together they explore abandoned U-Bahn stations. Not many novels introduce Hitler, disguised as an old woman on the U-Bahn, in their opening pages and this has a fresh and original voice. As much as of Tatiana, the book is a portrait of Berlin, a city famed for its richness and strangeness, hauntingly captured by Aridjis. It's hard at points not to wish for a little more plot, but it is impressive none the less. Aridjis has been compared with Murakami and the authors share a sense of dream-like wandering.