Birth of a Bridge

By Maylis de Kerangal and Jessica Moore

From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes Birth of a Bridge – the story of a handful of men and women of various backgrounds and classes, who assemble around the construction of a giant suspension bridge in Coca, a fictional city somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California.

Told on a sweeping scale reminiscent of classic American adventure films, this Médicis Prize–winning novel chronicles the lives of these individuals, who represent a microcosm of not just mythic California, but of humanity as a whole. Their collective effort to complete (or oppose) the mega-project recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate – and to radically transform – our world through built form, with all the dramatic tension it brings: a threatened strike, an environmental dispute, sabotage, accidents, career moves, and love affairs … Here generations and social classes cease to exist, and everyone and everything converges toward the bridge as metaphor, a cross-cultural impression of America today.

De Kerangal’s writing has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. Her rich prose plays with different registers (from the most highly literary to the most colloquial slang) as well as speed and tension through grammatical ellipsis and elision. She employs a huge vocabulary and invents new relationships between words in a completely innovative use of language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889228900

Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of twenty novels and short-story collections, including three that have been translated into English by Jessica Moore and published by Talonbooks: Painting Time, Birth of a Bridge (Prix Médicis, Prix Franz Hessel, Premio Gregor von Rezzori), and Mend the Living (winner of a dozen literary prizes, translated into forty languages, adapted for cinema and theatre). She was an associate artist at the Musée d’Orsay in 2019–2020 and Chair of Literature at Sciences Po Paris in 2020. She lives and works in Paris.