Address: A Novel — Two Women and a Building That Remembers Everything

Everybody told me this was a beach read. A "fun historical romp." A "page-turner about a building." And look—they're not wrong, exactly. But I think they're underselling what Fiona Davis is doing here, which is writing about the specific way that buildings absorb the moral compromises of the people who live in them. The Dakota isn't just a setting. It's a character with a body count.

I started this one during a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise, who was half-listening through one earbud while I had the other. By the time we looped back past Montrose Harbor, she pulled her earbud out and said, "I need to know what happens to Sara." Reader, that's the highest compliment my wife gives any audiobook. She usually reserves her enthusiasm for true crime podcasts and texts from our daughter.

Two Women, One Address, and the Architecture of Ruin

The dual timeline structure is well-worn territory in historical fiction—I've assigned enough of these to my AP Lit students to know the formula. Laura Lippman pulls off something similarly layered in Lady in the Lake, where the dual structure earns its complexity through character rather than gimmick. But Davis earns it here because the two stories aren't just thematically parallel; they're architecturally connected. Sara Smythe in 1884 is managing the Dakota as it's being built, watching Gilded Age wealth calcify into something grotesque. Bailey Camden in the 1980s is watching the same apartment get gutted in a renovation that strips away every original detail—and she's gutting herself with cocaine and free-flowing cocktails at the same pace. The building holds both stories the way old plaster holds old wallpaper: layer over layer, each one covering up something the previous tenant didn't want to see.

What got me—and this is the English teacher in me talking—is how Davis handles the dramatic irony. We know from the description that Sara Smythe ends up in an asylum and eventually kills Theodore Camden. We know this going in. So every tender scene between Sara and Theo carries this undertow of dread. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about the dignity of movement of an iceberg—seven-eighths of it underwater. You're listening to a love story while knowing it's actually an origin story for violence. The prose deserves to be savored in those moments, and at 1.0x, I felt every bit of that tension building.

The Narrator Question (and It Is a Question)

Here's where I have to be honest, because this audiobook has a split personality in the narration department. Brittany Pressley handles Bailey's 1980s chapters with a convincing Southern accent and a restrained energy that matches a woman white-knuckling her way through early sobriety. She's good. Reliably good. Her male character voices lean a little masculine without tipping into caricature, and she lets Bailey's vulnerability come through in the pauses between sentences. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation.

Saskia Maarleveld is... a different animal. She's got this naturally low, gravelly voice that works beautifully for Sara's determination and steel. When Sara is navigating the politics of managing a building full of Astors and Vanderbilts as a woman in 1884, that voice carries authority. But—and I say this with genuine respect for her skill—there's this dramatic rasp she does at the end of certain sentences that starts to feel like its own character. By hour six or seven, I noticed it pulling me out of the story. It's like watching a brilliant stage actor who can't quite calibrate for the intimacy of a small theater. The performance is impressive, but sometimes you want it to step back and let Davis's sentences do the work.

The transitions between narrators and time periods are smooth, though. No jarring cuts. You always know exactly where and when you are, which matters when you're toggling between gaslight and neon.

Who This Is Really For (and Who Should Keep Walking)

If you loved The Age of Innocence and wished Wharton had written a thriller underneath all that social maneuvering, this is its spiritual successor—with a recovery narrative bolted on. My students would hate this. I love it. The pacing is steady rather than breathless, the mystery unfolds through character rather than plot twists, and Davis trusts you to sit with ambiguity about Sara's mental state for a long time before giving you answers.

Skip it if you need your historical fiction to move at a sprint, or if vocal quirks in narration are a dealbreaker for you. Maarleveld's style is polarizing enough that I'd recommend sampling before committing.

Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For

This is a building novel in the best sense—it's about the way we construct identities, relationships, and lives inside structures that outlast us, and how those structures remember what we'd rather forget. At eleven hours and change, it's a solid commitment, but it never dragged for me. Not even during the faculty meeting where I definitely wasn't listening to it. (Principal Martinez, I remain attentive to all budget discussions.)

Davis has written something that works as entertainment and as architecture criticism and as a quiet meditation on addiction, ambition, and what happens when women are punished for wanting too much. That's a lot of weight for one novel to carry, and it carries it. Mostly. The 1980s storyline occasionally feels thinner than the 1884 one—Bailey's recovery arc hits some familiar beats—but the final revelations tie everything together in a way that's satisfying without being neat. Life isn't neat. Neither is the Dakota.