When Sara arrives at the Dakota and is immediately promoted from housekeeper to the role of “lady managerette,” she is befriended by the building’s architect, Theodore Camden, a married man whose family will soon take up residence there. For these two women, the Dakota becomes a place of critical importance to their personal histories, as a site of both ruin and of promise. Similar to The Dollhouse with its two female protagonists from different eras, The Address features two women - Sara Smythe, the head housekeeper at London’s Langham Hotel who comes to America in 1884 to work at the Dakota and Bailey Camden, a young interior designer struggling with addiction and trying to make a decent life for herself in the New York of 1985. The building at the center of this novel is the Manhattan apartment house the Dakota, a prestigious Upper West Side residence opened in 1884 and made infamous almost a century later as the location of John Lennon’s murder. And, happily, it works reasonably well again in her second novel, The Address, a thoroughly engaging read with elements of romance, mystery, and tragedy.
As a technique for making interesting socio-historical comparisons, this approach worked well for her debut novel, The Dollhouse (2016), a story about New York City’s Barbizon Hotel and its fictional inhabitants. Canadian-born, New York City-based novelist Fiona Davis has discovered a winning formula for her fiction: pair the history of a real-life landmark building with the imagined lives of those who might have lived or worked there, and structure the story as a dual narrative with alternating time periods.
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