The Bridge of Years

May Sarton’s celebrated novel of family, philosophy, and survival, set between the two great wars that cleaved Europe in two

In the wake of the First World War, life for the Duchesnes goes on almost as it always has. Situated near a vegetable garden, an orchard, and rolling green pastures, their Belgian estate is one of the few that escaped dereliction in the difficult preceding years.
 
The garden is Mélanie Duchesne’s lifeblood—a boost to her seemingly unending well of vitality. The introspective Paul finds his refuge in writing, his most deeply held ambition. But as the years pass, Paul’s books find little audience, and husband and wife focus instead on their furniture business and their growing family. The Bridge of Years follows the Duchesnes in the years leading up to World War II—their daily exploits and travails, the small moments and mundane beauties that fill their lives. When their German friend Schmidt arrives for a visit, he brings news of an impending nightmare in the East that is threatening to overturn life as they know it.
 
With the specter of fascism looming, the rising tensions bring out the best in Paul, whose writing enjoys renewed vigor and intensity, as well as in Mélanie, whose steadfast determination might be the very thing that saves her family as war knocks at their door once again.

“Beautifully wrought . . . deeply felt and significant in theme.” —Saturday Review
 
“A delicately lovely novel . . . Its style is limpid, unpretentious, beautifully expressive, and its content is beyond all things warmly and humanly emotional.” —New York Herald Tribune
 
“Beautifully wrought . . . deeply felt and significant in theme.” —Saturday Review
 
“Distinguished by its honesty and its broad plane of inquiry.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“The conflict of the inner life as against the immediate, in the terms of one family, gently rendered.” —Kirkus Reviews

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award.

An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her memoir Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.