An entire apartment building in Paris, its facade removed as though for a dollhouse, reveals in a single frozen moment the lives, obsessions, and accumulated stories of its inhabitants across a century. Published in 1978, this novel's architecture is as elaborate as the building it describes: ninety-nine chapters governed by the knight's tour of a chessboard, each room a world unto itself. At the center stands Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman who devotes fifty years to a project of exquisite futility, painting watercolors that become puzzles that are then reassembled and dissolved. It is an encyclopedia of human striving that teaches, with tenderness and grief, that every life is a puzzle whose last piece is always missing.