The Invisible Bridge
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4.5 • 16 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
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.