This Must Be the Place

A charming and undeniably powerful debut novel set in Berlin, "This Must Be the Place" chronicles the friendship between a fading actor and a young married American woman who are both learning to live with the past. A charming and undeniably powerful debut novel set in Berlin, This Must Be the Place chronicles the friendship between a fading actor and a young married American woman who are both learning to live with the past.A charming and undeniably powerful debut novel set in Berlin about the friendship between a fading actor and a young married American woman who are both learning to live with the past. Walter Baum has one of the most famous voices in Germany, if no longer a famous face. A former television star, heas been dubbing Tom Cruiseas lines into German for fifteen years, since he returned from a failed attempt to make it as an actor in Hollywood. Now he finds himself nearing forty, alone and adrift. In the apartment just below him, a young American woman named Hope is slipping further and further into herself. Having fled New York a month earlier to join her workaholic husband in Berlin, she finds herself more isolated than ever and unable to cope with the sense of foreboding created by the haunted city around her and the painful memories from the one she just left. These two broken people form an unlikely friendship, at first out of loneliness, but then deepening out of genuine affinity. They are finally forced to reveal their secrets and examine their pasts, and, as a pair, they explore how to reconcile their hopes for the future with the ache of history that lingers, permanently, beneath the surface. Funny, insightful, and moving, "This Must Be the Place" is an expertly crafted debut novel about the events that bind us together and the friendships that make and remake us whole.