Friedrichstrasse is, of course, a real street, still combining the plush with the rough, the romance of Berlin with its tragedy. Bisected after the war by the Berlin Wall, it made regular cameos in a succession of Cold War thrillers as the location of the now almost mythic Checkpoint Charlie.

Emma Harding’s Friedrichstrasse 19 is an ingenious and ambitious debut, formally inventive, rich with character and incident. Her characters are unified by the fact of having lived at the address in the title, but at different points between the early 20th century and early 21st. Heike, a “child of the DDR”, is the character who is (more or less) our contemporary. She leapt over the Wall the year it fell and is still in thrall to the freedoms of the unified city.

Heike’s feelings about the city seem to mirror Harding’s own: “The regular pulse of the trams and the U-Bahn, the intestinal complexity of cabling and sewers, pipes and fibre-optics, the flow of people, the apparent self-organisation of it, the unspoken conspiracy to get along, to make it work, to somehow find one’s own space within it.”

Heike is joined on these pages by other oddballs: the asexual pornographer, the new-minted lesbian discovering the Weimar demi-monde, the young man exposing his family’s Nazi past. Most are what one of Harding’s characters describes as “outcasts & rebels & queers”.

Harding has worked for some years as a writer and producer of drama for BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her prose has something of the radio writer’s fondness for the sort of calculated lyricism that it can be a pleasure to read aloud.