The Shape of Us Before We Met

Ana is an architectural historian who trusts millimetres, plans, and the stubborn facts of buildings. In a corridor of Ljubljana's National and University Library, she finds a door that should not exist.

It opens into her husband Matej's life before her.

At first, the room seems archival: his old desk, his handwriting, the person he was before thirty years of marriage. But every visit alters the architecture. Corridors appear from remembered stories. Rooms preserve lives he almost lived. Ana's own pre-history begins to open in return.

As husband and wife move deeper into these impossible spaces, certainty becomes harder to defend. Are they exploring what happened, what might have happened, or the shared fiction they have spent decades building around each other?

A warm, unsettling novel about memory, marriage, and the histories love invents in order to endure.