In the declining years of the Weimar Republic, an ambitious young architect builds a dream house by a lake near Berlin. Almost immediately, catastrophe strikes as the landowner's daughter commits suicide and the Jewish neighbours refuse to move "despite being offered almost half the value of their property". A Red Army recruit rapes the architect's wife before the house becomes the property of a persecuted intellectual imprisoned for trying to swim away to the west. Jenny Erpenbeck's novel is an ambitious attempt to compress 20th-century trauma into a single address, but though the narrative painstakingly traces the movement of glaciers and the potato beetle, it rattles through the human history with confusing swiftness: "Everyone likes to watch the sun as long as possible, says Hermine, Ludwig's mother, grandmother of Doris." Erpenbeck describes wartime atrocities in the unsettling tone of a fairy tale, but the stream-of-consciousness flourishes are a bit winsome: "Let's go hide under the fir bush, give me a  I want to twitter, me too."

Jenny Erpenbeck's third novel explores the relationship between a place and the people who live there. Set on a lake in the Brandenburg forest, the book is concerned with themes of connection, of permanence and transience. Erpenbeck traces the stories of the inhabitants of the area from the late 19th century on through the turbulence of the 20th, the years of war, the Soviet occupation, while all the time the waters of the lake silently reflect the upheavals of history. One of the earliest sections, "The Wealthy Farmer and His Four Daughters", has something of the rhythm of a fairytale as Erpenbeck describes the local customs and superstitions surrounding marriage and death. After the suicide of Klara, the last of these daughters, the woodland is sold off and built upon.

The concept of home shifts with the passing of the years and a house, designed and constructed as a place of comfort and escape, is gradually transformed. Concealment, of oneself and one's possessions in the face of invasion, is a recurring image, as is that of violation, of body, of land.

The novel, which is a spare, delicate thing, only 150 pages long, encompasses both the domestic and the horrific. Erpenbeck's writing, with its repetitions of situation and expression, is soothing and cocooning, which only magnifies the moments of horror: the brief, brutal fate of an elderly Jewish couple is captured in one chilling line; a young girl slowly starves in a closet in the Warsaw ghetto. No one character is given precedence over another and as a result the book has the feel of a mosaic, with all the various pieces linked by the figure of the gardener, the one constant, connecting presence. These sequences provide moments of calm and peace within the narrative, refocusing the reader's attentions on the land and its needs, the passing of the seasons, the continual process of flowering and fading. And though eventually the house is packed up, the land parcelled out and sold on, the lake remains to bear witness.