The Invisible Bridge
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4.6 • 12 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, an architecture student, has arrived from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to Clara Morgenstern a young widow living in the city. When Andras meets Clara he is drawn deeply into her extraordinary and secret life, just as Europe's unfolding tragedy sends them both into a state of terrifying uncertainty.
From a remote Hungarian village to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labour camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a marriage tested by disaster and of a family, threatened with annihilation, bound by love and history.
'Phenomenal, enthralling ... You don't so much read it as live it' Simon Schama, Financial Times
'To bring an entire lost world - its sights, its smells, its heartaches, raptures and terrors - to vivid life between the covers of a novel is an accomplishment; to invest that world, and everyone who inhabits it, with a soul, as Julie Orringer does in The Invisible Bridge, takes something more like genius' Michael Chabon
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Orringer's stunning first novel far exceeds the expectations generated by her much-lauded debut collection, How to Breath Underwater. In this WWII saga, Orringer illuminates the life of Andras L vi, a Hungarian Jew of meager means whose world is upended by a scholarship to the cole Sp ciale d'Architecture in Paris. There, he makes an unlikely liaison with ballet teacher Claire Morgenstern (n e Klara H sz), a woman nine years his senior whose past links her to a wealthy Hungarian family familiar to Andras. Against the backdrop of grueling school assignments, exhausting work at a theater, budding romance, and the developing kinship between Andras and his fellow Jewish students, Orringer ingeniously depicts the insidious reach of the growing tide of anti-Semitism that eventually lands him back in Hungary. Once there, Orringer sheds light on how Hungary treated its Jewish citizens first, sending them into hard labor, though not without a modicum of common decency but as the country's alliance with Germany strengthens, the situation for Jews becomes increasingly dire. Throughout the hardships and injustices, Andras's love for Claire acts as a beacon through the unimaginable devastation and the dark hours of hunger, thirst, and deprivation. Orringer's triumphant novel is as much a lucid reminder of a time not so far away as it is a luminous story about the redemptive power of love.
Customer Reviews
The Invisible Bridge
One of the greatest books I have ever read; absorbing, compelling, beautiful, tragic and uplifting. 600 pages but couldn't put it down and became totally involved. Writers like this don't come around very often. My only gripe - as an Englishman - was, in amongst the beautiful prose, the frequent use of the word 'gotten' to substitute any number of better verbs like 'acquired', 'received', 'arrived', etc. It was like being on a placid lake in a beautiful forest in a boat drifting downstream... Then 'gotten' - and the illusion and prose was shattered. What a pity... Perhaps that was why it was only long-listed and not short-listed because, for my money, this epically momentous book ought to have won - with that caveat! Makes my novel, The Revolution Of The Species, a thriller in a totally different genre, seem inadequate - despite it being brilliant in its own way! Do read Invisible Bridge - it will have a profound and prolonged effect on you... Simon Holder.
Excellent!
An epic story and now one of my all-time favourite books. Complex plot and heart-wrenching circumstances.