Lionel Shriver ‘Jim shows me his wedding photo. He cut a dashing figure in 1969’

I first met our neighbour opposite after he had watched my husband and me struggle on to a roofer’s scaffold, to repaint our trim. Taking pity, he lent us his ladder. Since then, when off to the shops, I’ve often wanted to wave to him, smoking on his step, but the ladder loan wasn’t a formal introduction and I’ve felt too shy.

But, at my approach, our neighbour unhesitatingly invites me into his immaculate home. Classy new kitchen, all black and white. A bucolic patio out the back includes a fish pond stocked with goldfish and carp.

We live in Bermondsey, south London. Dublin-born Jim has barely been back to Ireland since 1971, yet he still speaks with a brogue. He’s trim, with short, grey hair, a long face, smoker’s teeth. Until a year ago, he did painting, renovation and home maintenance.

At 68, he would still be working if it weren’t for his hands. Two fingers of one and all four of the other curl involuntarily towards the palms (I look it up: “Dupuytren’s contracture”). After an operation on one hand, the fingers curled right back. Offered the same operation on the other, he said no, thanks.

Yet he can hold a paintbrush or hammer, just. He does jobs for longstanding elderly customers at no charge. Recently, he replaced a 98-year-old’s vertically striped wallpaper with more fashionable horizontal stripes. Jim is amazed she gave a toss about such fashions, at her age.

Long self-employed, Jim is a renegade. When he arrived in Britain in 1968, he signed up for nine years in the army (a deadly place for a renegade). After 10 months, he requested permission to get married and his NCO said no. Then 19, he deserted and got married anyway. He was picked up, sentenced to 31 days and given a dishonourable discharge.

He shows me his wedding pic. He cut a dashing figure in 1969, with a Beatles-style haircut. His wife was a looker, too. They met when he was 15, she 14. They had eight kids, and are still together.

Jim hates retirement. Still waking at 6am from habit, he has nothing to get up for. The only television he’ll watch is football and boxing. He doesn’t have a computer and has never been on the internet (“That’s where all the rows start!”). He mostly maintains the house; when out of tasks, he “talks to the fish”. Cutting back vices leaves only more time on his hands: a dozen daily cans of Guinness down to four, 20 rollies down to 12 (he saves the butts to keep count). If this sounds gloomy, he’s still spirited company. He thrives on keeping busy.

Jim is not the holiday type (surprise). He has gone on one in his life, this year, to Málaga. He wanted to go home the moment they arrived. No English beer! And nothing to do. In all the snaps, he’s clutching a pint, looking sullen. The pool, he despairs, was smaller than his fishpond.

He has lived in this house for 36 years, nearby for two more. This area used to be a real community, he says. Everyone knew one another by name and did each other favours. When you headed to the shops, you left the door open. Everyone kept a house key on a string reachable through the letterbox, which is astonishing.

Now his once white, working-class neighbourhood has “gone to hell”. Apportioning much of the area’s social housing to non-EU immigrants, the council steadily sells off single-family dwellings to gentrifiers like me. Better-off newcomers are friendly, but mostly with each other. As for the poorer long-time residents and immigrants, Jim is right: there’s precious little mixing.

When we part, he remembers my house’s annual wood deliveries. We have a wood stove, I explain. For carrying 90 bags of logs from the front to the far back garden, I’m in training all year. This physical exertion he has observed has made a much more considerable impression than my lolling around writing novels.

Next time I see Jim on his step, I’ll say hello. Maybe if I knocked on a few more doors, I would live in the companionable neighbourhood I’ve always wanted.

Lionel Shriver is the author of 11 novels, including We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Chigozie Obioma ‘How much did he think his collection was worth? It was clear it ran into the millions’

Eighteen months ago, when I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, from Michigan, I was attracted to a house with a sun room on the south side of town. I knew at once it was the place I wanted to rent. The room, constructed with minimal walling, so the sun glares from every side, provides a rich view of the vicinity. Our part of the street is quiet and one hardly sees one’s neighbours. There are no kids for a few blocks and the building beside mine – divided by a gravel drive – is empty.

But behind this one is a white fenced house, where one can see a garden and sculptures. An uninviting facade crouches beneath a welter of plants, and in the backyard one sometimes sees a middle-aged man, a shock of grey hair lining the sides of his head, surveying the garden or working through the grass with a lawnmower. It was into this man’s house that I walked one Saturday evening. (I asked him that morning; he said to come back later.)

Dominique Chéenne has two houses: one in Lincoln, the other in Chicago, where until recently he was a professor of sound and acoustics. His office is a little museum of musical instruments and acoustic equipment. As a boy growing up in the south of France, he told me, he found a radio set in the trash. More than 40 years later, he still remembers that transformative moment: “It was quite new and red. It wasn’t merely a transistor, as was prevalent in those days, but a real radio.” Dominique set to work, repaired it and that was the beginning of a lifelong career in sound systems.

In his office, hidden from the street by trees, there are more than 100 gadgets – tape decks, amplifiers, reel-to-reel recorders – many of which he has repaired. He works across the US and overseas, building soundproof walls for churches, clubs and offices, fixing sound systems in airports. That rescue of a radio gave him his career and a PhD; it was also how he met his wife.

While a student of electronics in France, Dominique was contracted to build a sound system for a new nightclub, in return for paid work at the bar. There he met Julia, a striking American from Iowa. He followed her to the US in 1972 and on to Lincoln, where her parents had recently moved to work as Christian ministers. This is where they made their home.

We had been talking for an hour when Dominique mentioned my novel, The Fishermen. His wife, who teaches part-time at the same university as me, had raved about it, but Dominique admitted he did not connect to it on a first read. But, a few weeks before, he had tried again and liked it. We talked about books, his fondness for the works of John Le Carré and Cormac McCarthy, and my own writing.

I asked him, how much did he think his sound collection might cost? He wouldn’t say, but it was clear it ran into the millions. He became contemplative again, squeezing his hands together. Then, as if he had suddenly remembered something, he raised his head and asked if I wanted one of the vinyl players.

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award and the Man Booker.

Jon McGregor ‘John is a software developer writing code; I’m a novelist, also working on codes’

Despite my community-minded aspirations, I’ve never been that good at talking to neighbours. I lived for a few years in a small block of flats with neighbours who seemed to live alone and almost always to be out (another possibility: I never heard them because my kids and I were the noisy neighbours). It was a convenient place for a time, but it never felt like it was going to be home, so I never made much effort.

I moved into a new house in August, with my partner and the many children we have accumulated between us. Because it feels like a place where we could stay put (we even have a garden and plans to plant trees, dig ponds and build tree houses), I’ve been meaning to work my way along the street and say hello.

I knock on John’s door and, before I’ve even explained why, we’ve spent several minutes talking about the sewage pump in his front garden. Anyway, John, I say, I’m supposed to knock on a stranger’s door for a chat. He points out that we’ve met before. Nottingham is a small, talkative city and social circles have overlapping points of intersection; ours was a brief and ill-advised spell of badminton several years ago.

He invites me in. While the kettle boils, we talk about his house and mine, the neighbours, the mixed blessing of working from home; he’s a software engineer, writing code, and I’m a novelist, so also working on codes, haha. We are both feeling a little awkward about the “chat” part of this enterprise. Instead, we talk about moving house – he and his family have lived here for three years – and about how life and work mean there’s never enough time to unpack.

We wander outside, tea in hand, and talk about the gnarled, old fruit trees their garden has in common with many others in the street. The light is starting to fade and in the shadows at the end of the garden I think I see a tree house. I try to keep my voice casual while I ask about it. (A tree house!) His parents-in-law built it, he says, in the garden of their previous house; it was put together in such a way that it could be dismantled when they moved. He shows me where they worked around the tree roots and describes his father-in-law hanging upside down from the branches to get all the pieces in place. He was 75 at the time, John adds. He was always very active. The past tense hangs in the air between us.

The dusk settles among the branches and the lights start coming on along the street. John tells me the names of some of the neighbours we can see drawing their curtains, and the ages of their children, and what some of them do for a living. I begin to feel a little furtive. We head back inside. There is talk of getting together again soon and, as I walk home, the street already feels a little smaller; a little more familiar.

Jon McGregor is the author of four novels, including the Costa-nominated Reservoir 13 and If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

Simon Van Booy ‘When Peter first moved here, he would leave his car windows open so they wouldn’t get smashed’

I thought this would be easy. My American wife and daughter, both New Yorkers, disagreed. (I grew up in England, in a small town near Oxford.) But seriously: how hard could it be? The plan was simple. Pace the block, choose a door, then knock and wait.

I first lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1998, when you could rent an enormous, shared space for the same price as a gym membership now. For years, landlords had wanted people living in their buildings to stop them from being deliberately burned down or turned into drug dens. On the opposite side of the street, a motorcycle gang had made their headquarters; they sawed off a row of parking meters, and in the evening would drag‑race up and down the cracked asphalt. But, last year, even they were forced to move on.

I returned to Williamsburg full-time in 2005. After living here for almost 12 consecutive years, it’s worth mentioning an unspoken rule that may be unique to New York City. You can approach anybody on the street and, if they’re not in a hurry, they will probably stop and hear what you have to say – not out of a sense of obligation, like the English, but through genuine curiosity. However, under no circumstances should a stranger expect to be invited into a New Yorker’s home, unless it is for sex or to fix the internet.

My own street is a row of high-rises with reflective glass and 24-hour doormen. But I wanted to meet people who had been living here during the 20th century; in those multi-family tenements where generations of families had lived since the 1930s.

Meeting someone the old-fashioned way felt exciting, almost fetishistic – except no one was answering the door. So, the next day, I emailed a man named Sean Curneen, a local real estate broker: perhaps a personal introduction might work. Sean was having a local open house on Sunday. I was welcome to meet the owner, Peter.

When I showed up, Peter and Sean were sitting on lawn chairs between the two properties Peter owns: a two-family town house, which is on the market for $2.5m; and a large converted factory where Peter, a woodworker, lives with his wife, a sculptor, and their two children. He tells me they wouldn’t be able to live in the neighbourhood if they hadn’t bought this place 17 years ago.

When Peter moved here in 1987, he would leave his car windows open so they wouldn’t get smashed. “Once,” he says, “I was followed home by a pack of wild dogs, and there was a car on fire on my block, but that was normal.”

He tells me this street was heavily Italian, with many residents related to one another, most hailing from the town of Teggiano, in Campania. Across from where they are sitting, plastic, bulb-lit icons of 12th-century Saint Conus wave from front windows. The area once had a heavy mob presence, he says.

Peter still feels this is a real neighbourhood, with a close-knit community. “People in their 20s and 30s are moving in and starting families,” he says. “And they’re very nice people who care, and that builds a neighbourhood.”

Two houses up, a fire in December 2015 killed two neighbours he knew well. Faulty wiring resulted in a blaze that had 200 firefighters battling to contain it. Soon after, a fundraiser was held at a nearby restaurant to collect money for the surviving tenants. “What doesn’t build a neighbourhood is the lack of planning by developers and low standards of construction,” Peter says. He laments the bulldozing of local buildings of historical significance.

Then the impossible happens: Peter asks if I would like to come in – not to his home, but to his woodworking shop. When I gasp at its size, he admits the rent would allow him to retire. “But then what would I do?”

He leads me over to a heavy beam of greying, damaged wood, one of dozens he has purchased as salvage from local factories as they are converted into modern premises; the empty factory space on Bedford Avenue is the neighbourhood’s first Apple shop. Peter shows me another beam from a tree that was 267 years old when it was cut down; it was alive at the same time as Shakespeare.

Later that evening, as my daughter brushes her teeth, I look out of her bedroom window on to Peter’s properties. It feels good to have a sense of who lives behind doors we’ve been staring at for eight years, and to know that when we see a light on late at night, it’s Peter in his studio, working on a commission, or standing at his lathe, marvelling at the beauty and history of what’s so easily discarded in the name of progress and quick profit.

Simon Van Booy is the author of seven works of fiction, including Father’s Day and The Illusion of Separateness.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan ‘Local rumour has it that 14 kids were once crammed into the house at the end of our street’

I practise my greeting under my breath. I’m quite shy and worried that my mouth will gum up after hello. I ring the doorbell. Nothing. The lights are off. I straighten my back and stride one door down. I look for the fat orange cat that often sits at the window, but he’s absent. I knock. Nothing.

Miraculously, a door a little farther along the street opens. A man with the sort of moustache I associate with BBC period dramas sticks his head out, then informs me he doesn’t live here. He’s helping his daughter move out.

From the safety of my kitchen, I compose a letter asking my immediate neighbours if they are free. A few hours later, Marek appears, waving my note. Marek is a tall man and he fills the doorway, holding my anxious scribble in his big hand. He has a genial aura. I’ve seen him once before, helping his wife unload shopping from the car in the twilight; we have exchanged nods.

We sit at the kitchen table to chat. I tell him I moved in two months ago, so I am just getting to know the area. Marek fills in the gaps. He tells me the name of the fat orange cat: Garfield. Marek has been helping her owner, Pearl, with errands. He and his wife are also cat owners, and cat owners naturally become friends.

He has lived in his house for 29 years, after falling in love with the area as a geography student at the local polytechnic. He was studying the crafts business in Hackney, east London, at the places that used to make veneer. These days, Marek works in public housing.

In almost three decades, the neighbourhood has changed a bit, he says. In the 80s, there was a chip shop around the corner. “People were still interested in chip shops then.” Next to it, there was a convenience shop called the Dairy, run by two old ladies. “There were tins on the shelf and you’d say: ‘I’d like one of those, please.’ They’d have to stand on something, get the tin and give it to you.”

Marek’s voice becomes animated as we drift deeper into the past. Local rumour has it that 14 kids were once crammed into the house at the end of the street. “When they were all being fed, they used to sit one on each stair. It was the only place they could all be fed at one time.”

He asks if I knew that our street lost three boys in the first world war? The British Library had an exhibition, where he found a map of which houses were blitz-damaged. Part of our street was hit; Marek can recite the house numbers. I tell him about an article I wrote on a library bomb shelter. He tells me about a tragic accident, when two buses arrived at that same bomb shelter as the sirens were going. We pause to think of all the people who have walked through this room.

The light outside has blued and we can hear the children coming back from school. Marek takes his leave. That night, as I hurry for the bus, I feel more at home with the ghosts of this street.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel, Harmless Like You, was shortlisted for the 2017 Desmond Elliott prize.

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