Female Ruins Author:Geoff Nicholson This is Geoff Nicholson's architecture novel. A dazzling hybrid of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Female Ruins is the story of Christopher Howell, a cult architect who allegedly built just one building- reputedly a wild, willful amalgam of styles ranging from 11th-century Norman to 20th-century Nuetra. Ingenio... more »usly built into the narrative are bits of Howell's essays, which celebrate the idea of the "Cardbouard House" and the architecture of impermance.
When Howell's daughter-and keeper of his floam- Kelly, and a Howell groupie named Jack Dexter hook up in a free-falling love affair, the search for this apocryphal building becomes a search for a lost past. Brilliantly funny and seroiously obsessive, Female Ruins show how the castles we build are often symbols of our own needs, follies, and magnificent obsessions.« less