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The Invisible Bridge »

Book cover image of The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Authors: Julie Orringer
ISBN-13: 9781400041169, ISBN-10: 1400041163
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: May 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: Julie Orringer

Julie Orringer is making a splash with her breakthrough short story collection How to Breathe Underwater. Fellow author Ann Packer called it "the debut of an exceptionally gifted writer," and our Editors agree -- naming it as a finalist in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award program.

Book Synopsis

Julie Orringer's astonishing first novel--eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater ("Fiercely beautiful"--The New York Times)--is a grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he becomes involved with the letter's recipient, his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena, their younger brother leaves school for the stage--and Europe's unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. From the Hungarian village of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras's garret to the enduring passion he discovers on the rue de...

The Washington Post - Donna Rifkind

…Orringer uses the symbolism of invisible bridges in many inventive ways, re-engineering traditional dimensions of time and space, calibrating the immensity of world-war deaths against the specifics of one family's life, and building emotional connections between parents and children, husbands and wives, the preserved and the obliterated…She maintains a fine balance between the novel's intimate moments…and its panoramic set-pieces. Even those monumental scenes manage to display a tactful humility: This is a story, they keep reminding us, and it's not bringing anybody back. With its moving acknowledgment of the gap between what's been lost and what can be imagined, this remarkably accomplished first novel is itself, in the continuing stream of Holocaust literature, an invisible bridge.

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