bought from Le Galetas, three books 4 frs (1 kg)

There are several number 11s here - the famous one in Downing Street makes an appearance, along with other houses, 11 stories and the Number 11 bus that circles around Birmingham.
The first word that came into my head to describe this book was "semi-detached". By which I mean that the chapters almost stand as individual stories with disparate settings (luxury safari camp, food bank, Didcot, Chelsea, a TV reality show shot in Australia, Loch Ness)... yet they are all linked by various characters. It came as a surprise to pay a visit to the Musée de l'Art Brut in Lausanne (after lunch at the Beau-Rivage), but I have not yet decided whether Coe has actually been to Lausanne or whether he just researched it on internet and fathomed things out from a map (as must have done, for example, Orsenna in his Un jour comme à Lausanne). To this end I made some notes:

A Sunday in Lausanne
After lunch at the Beau-Rivage:

She walked for about an hour, at first by the side of the lake and then through the wide, almost empty boulevards of the city centre, which seemed modern and comfortable but completely without character.

We only have one boulevard, which is not in the city centre but between the lake and the railway station. It is not particularly wide but in an area of beautiful Belle-Epoque buildings, one of the rare parts of Lausanne that is architecturally harmonious and characterful. Elsewhere, no two buildings are alike. It is Sunday, so the streets (none of which are wide, not even rue Centrale) might be fairly empty, but the lakeside would be bustling as the cafés and restaurants are open, unlike the rest of town, and people go roller-blading, walking, etc.

Another ten minutes’ aimless walking brought her to the Avenue Bergières, where she paused outside the entrance to a museum. What appeared to be a fairly modest private house opposite the Palais de Beaulieu promised its visitors something called the Collection de l’Art Brut.

Rachel would have passed it in the limousine taking her from the airport to the Beau Rivage.
I doubt if anyone walking aimlessly round the city centre would slog uphill to end up at Bergières – it’s out in an uninteresting residential area. "Aimless wandering" would take you round the winding, cobbled streets of the centre, to the Riponne or up to the cathedral. Possibly, she could have walked up to the station then gone up Ruchonnet, past Clinique Cécil, over the Chauderon bridge, up Beaulieu towards the Source clinic then turned left, but how boring – missing out on the centre completely. As a matter of fact she would have done this whole route in the other direction driving down from the airport. And if it were the case she would have seen a quite startling mix of architecture with the modern administrative building, the chequered Galfetti tower and the blue glassy Source amidst stately but sometimes run-down 19th-century terraced apartment buildings.
The Palais de Beaulieu opposite the museum is a long and hideous block of concrete. The museum is not in a modest private house but a small and quite pretty 18th-century château, with a wooded park.

The description of the museum itself is fine. It’s a great museum, though some people find it harrowing - the distress of some of the artists is tangible.

Towards the end of the book, when Rachel is left to look after the twin girls in the otherwise empty Chelsea house, the tone veers to scary, not for the faint-hearted and those who hear noises in the rooms at night. Or keep off the Lagavulin.

I'd be tempted to leave this in Soleure which has a special affinity with the number 11, but I'm not expecting to go there in the immediate future and need to clear some space, so here it is, closer to home.