Ben Coates must have used up a lot of shoe leather when he was out researching The Invention of Amsterdam: Europe’s greatest city in 10 walks.

Coates, who has lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade, criss-crosses the city from east to west and from north to south, taking in the sights, explaining each specific phase in the city’s history and writing about whatever crosses his path.

He joins a Keti Koti parade, smokes weed in a coffee shop and revisits the site of the Bijlmermeer plane crash. He checks out the canalside mansion gardens on Open Garden Day and wonders where the tulips are.

He observes demonstrations and the Pride celebrations, and visits synagogues, churches and museums in a vivid and relentless stream of observations, anecdotes and storytelling. The book is an almost exhausting read.

Nevertheless, Coates is a warm and witty guide, and it is easy to feel you are out walking with him, caught up in conversation. “Three men stumble past me looking very drunk,” he writes. “And I hear a mother tell her children, in Dutch, that ‘those men have been drinking special orange juice and now they’re very happy’.”

But Coates does not shy away from the difficult parts of Amsterdam’s history either, from the VOC and slavery to the horrors and impact of World War II.

Walking away from the Auschwitz Memorial in the Wertheimpark, he writes that he is “feeling sad to the bones”. While visiting the suburbs, he comments that “tolerance of Islam is one area where that famous Dutch open-mindedness seems to be in short supply”.

For the relatively new arrival, The Invention of Amsterdam offers a lively and accessible look at Amsterdam and its history, full of insights and information without being dry or abstract, and an easy and entertaining read.

To me, as someone who knows the city well, The Invention of Amsterdam is a reminder of forgotten places and stories – like chatting with an old friend about our shared memories of a city and planning to go out and rediscover it all.

Buy this book from the American Book Centre