It is the autumn of 2001 in Berlin. In a once grand building, on a forgotten corner of the city, an unlikely friendship is about to change two people's lives.Walter Baum is nearing forty. After a failed attempt to work as an actor in Hollywood sixteen years ago, he's been dubbing the lines of a famous American movie star into German, sitting in the dark, watching his bald spot and his beer belly expand while his options and his self-confidence diminish. In an identical apartment just downstairs, a young American woman named Hope rarely gets out of the bathtub. Having fled New York a month earlier to join her workaholic husband in Berlin, she is unable to cope with either the unfamiliar city around her or painful memories of the one she just left.When Hope and Walter meet by chance in the elevator, a sympathy develops, and then deepens, as together they begin to unravel secrets buried in the walls of their building and in their own personal histories, Against the backdrop of Berlin, a once divided city in the process of reconstructing itself, they finally come to reconcile their hopes for the future with the ache of the past that lingers, permanently, beneath the surface. Read Less