The review of a slim 39-page, pamphlet-like, A5-sized book with the odd image thrown in seems onerous. However, having read Frances Stark’s The Architect and The Housewife three times, each time with greater attention than the last, the prospect of producing an unequivocal architectural review becomes considerably more complicated.

Summarily, Stark’s book recounts the exploits of a thirty-something artist who works alone, sometimes at home, and is under pressure to knit together home life and professional integrity. Significantly, The Architect and The Housewife is not a standard architectural text but an artist book published through Book Works, a London-based non-profit commissioning organisation, which collaborates with artists to produce books under a variety of inventive and purposefully challenging circumstances and themes.