Home: the story of everyone who ever lived in our house, by Julie Myerson

Ghosts that crowd a London living room

If this book was a house, the neighbours would bang on the walls. "Oy, you, Julie Myerson," they would yell. "Can you stop twittering and get on with it? You're driving us mad with your ceaseless prattle about what you, the children and the dog were doing when you had a call from someone who had nothing relevant to say!" From the neighbours on the other side comes more hammering: "If you must invent other people's dialogue, can you be bit more convincing?"

It grieves me to say this, since I might conceivably have parked outside their south London house (the subject of Home) while visiting a nearby cinema. Moreover, the Myersons are clearly good eggs. Sadly, their otherwise tasty omelette is spoiled by unnecessary ingredients: half a page in which Mr M explains to Ms M that, if you want to know who used to live in your house, you can try old electoral rolls. There are two and half pages about a visit to her osteopath. Digressions should be amusing or interesting, preferably both - but not neither.

Beneath all this verbal stone-cladding, however, is a fascinating structure. The householder- author stumbled across the name of the man who had owned her house in 1887. Like her, he was a writer and he had three children of exactly the same age as hers. Myerson decided to identify - and where possible interview - all the other occupants. She saw the result of her research as resembling one of those speeded-up nature films showing a plant's development - but run backwards, from 1988 (when they arrived) to 1873.

Finding the previous owner was easy; friends knew his ex-wife. Tracking down others involved new technology (trawling through electoral rolls on disc) and old tomes (she pulled a muscle on the massive collections of wills in the Probate Search Room, Holborn).

Home is not an instruction manual, but there are many tips for anyone doing the same detective work: back-numbers of Kelly's street directories; mail shots to people with a surname you're seeking; the Royal Archives at Windsor; the Public Record Office's "Returns of Passengers" to the UK from non-European ports.

She ends up with more than 60 individuals, many overlapping. The man she believed the original owner turned out to be the second. Asking one former resident about his childhood in the house, she discovered that he was unaware of ever having lived there: his mother had dumped him in a children's home when he was eight.

It is a fascinating quest, well deserving of its recent adaptation for Radio 4, but spoiled by the author's interminable conversations with her family and her clunky historical reconstructions. If this book was a property, we would sue the agents. As it is, we have to blame the editors. What we need is a "director's cut" of this doorstop. The only place for a doorstop is behind the door of a Des Res.