Edward Hollis describes this curious book as a history of interiors that "takes us from the cave to the cloud". It attempts to show that interiors remind us of "where we've come from, and who we are". The deliberately fragmentary selection of interiors coheres to form an unusual assemblage of stories about rooms and what filled them, about who used them and what they represented, and about how they came into being and came to be lost. Using his grandmother's sitting room as a starting point for each section, Hollis follows a loose chronology that brings the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey from the purple room where Roman emperors were born to the Big Brother house, from the secret toilet of a king to the "imaginary interiors" of computer games. The book itself is a cabinet of curiosities, in which the historical and imaginary, the personal and philosophical, are interweaved.
