Rachael Weiss was an Australian woman  with minimal Czech language skills, living in Prague, and desperately hunting for a job and a flat. Again and again she was knocked back. She writes that she was living in an ocean of despair.

She recalled that Shakespeare said that sleep knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. Weiss wrote bitterly: Not my sleep. It knitted me a woolly jumper of dread and misery. This book is the story of how she conquered that early despair.

Weiss had previously been living in Sydney, aged 41, unmarried and childless, and working as a mid-level administrator. She had earlier spent a year in Prague which was her ancestral city, and where her father still kept a flat. Now she wanted to start a new life there as a writer, in the city where Kafka was born, and had written Prague never lets you go ... this dear little mother has sharp claws.

Weiss soon discovered that complete freedom is not all it's cracked up to be. She found herself craving for boundaries to her life, something to tie her to the ground, yet at the same time forcing her to get up in the morning. As well as a home and a job she wanted a social life.

Then she came across a small ad in a newspaper: "English service. Spanish Synagogue, Rabbi Morton Narrowe." She went along and eventually found a building that was blank concrete on the outside and pure gorgeous Moroccan baroque on the inside. The magnificenceof it filled her with joy and love.

Weiss had a Jewish father but had been brought up a strict atheist. Back in Sydney, encouraged by a friend who was a believer in God, she went along to synagogue every Friday for 10 years. She never truly came to faith, but she connected to her Jewish roots and became familiar with the services.

In the Spanish Synagogue in Prague she discovered a community and she longed to be part of it. She spoke to the visiting rabbi and offered to assist, maybe singing in a choir. When he discovered that she knew most of the services he promptly asked her to lead them. She was stunned but managed to rise to the challenge, though she had no real idea of what she was doing.

Her struggle to buy a flat and get a job fills a large part of this richly entertaining memoir. Weiss has a way of writing that involves the reader totally in her daily struggle to make a go of life in Prague, and cope with the culture clash and absurdities of life in that ancient city.

Being employed by the unscrupulous and suspicious Leonard was, for Weiss and the rest of his staff, one crisis after another. Leonard was the manager of a hotel with the romantic name "At the Sign of the Three Bells", and Weiss  found a job as a general writer on the staff.

As a sideline Leonard got her to write horoscopes for various newspapers, including, by a bizarre twist, The Geelong Advertiser in far-off Australia. Weiss had to stop telling people about what she did because it upset them so much when she admitted that she made the horoscopes up.

Weiss was very proud of her skill at Scrabble and that helped her to make friends in Prague. But in the end her struggle to put down roots in that beautiful city came to nothing.

When she tried to renew her visa after three years she hit a blank wall, or rather, as she put it, the self-importance of the eternally communist bureaucracy with its demands for more and more bits of paper. Finally her passport was returned to her with two red slashes across the visa and Weiss had a month to leave the country.

She settled in England and rejoiced to be back working as a mid-level administrator, but still dreaming of continuing her writing career. Weiss now lives in Dublin.

As I read The Thing About Prague I was intrigued and entertained by the absurdities and eccentricities of Weiss'  experiences and the culture clash inevitable for an Australian in a European city formerly under communist rule. This is a delightful memoir.