Invisible Bridge A Novel

Praise for Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge

"One of the best books of the year."
-Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"If you're still looking for a 'big' novel to carry into the summer holidays-one in which you can lose yourself without the guilty suspicion that you're slumming-then Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge is the book you want. . . . Stunning. . . . In every admirable sense an 'ambitious' historical novel, in which large human emotions-profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties-play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty. . . . Orringer traverses this perilous rhetorical terrain with remarkable-and, more important, convincing, self-possession. . . . Remarkably affecting. . . . A life powerfully, unsentimentally and inspiringly evoked in this gracefully written and altogether remarkable first novel."
-Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

"The Invisible Bridge deserves to be praised. It takes the introspective themes we've loved so well in American literature-from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to A. M. Homes's Music for Torching-and points them in a different direction. . . . Rendered in sweeping, epic fashion . . . a close look at the terrible ways that enormous historical events can affect individual lives. . . . The strength of The Invisible Bridge lies in Orringer's ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world."
-Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"Evocative . . . exquisitely precise . . . rapturous . . . uses history as a backdrop to her story's grand passions with a sweep akin to that of Dr. Zhivago. . . . The horrors of war never become Ms. Orringer's primary subject. She devotes far more attention to conveying the intricacies of Jewish life . . . writing with both granddaughterly reverence and commanding authority."
-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Intricately layered. . . . We have seen images like these . . . in the literature of eyewitnesses such as Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész. . . . [Orringer makes] brilliant use of a deliberately old-fashioned realism to define individual fates engulfed by history's deadly onrush. . . . 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."
-Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post Book World

"Truly breathtaking . . . gloriously rendered . . . a sensual feast. . . . I didn't want it to end."
-Debra Spark, San Francisco Chronicle

"A straightforward storyteller, [Orringer] captures our attention with her sympathetic characters and lets her deft handling of time and place do the rest. She never indulges in melodrama. In her hands, the human drama, pared to its essentials, is heartbreaking-and inspiring-enough."
-Lloyd Sachs, Chicago Sun-Times

"Haunting. . . . [The Invisible Bridge] exhibits wonderfully evoked realism. . . . A literary throwback of sorts, a fat facsimile of a nineteenth-century novel, the kind of story that critics would faintly praise as 'sweeping' (commonly meaning they write it off in other respects) were the author not so obviously endowed with talent, and the novel's particularities so vibrant."
-Art Winslow, The Chicago Tribune

"Dazzling . . . Like Tolstoy and Stendhal, she chronicles sea changes in European history through the eyes of finely fashioned characters, and like them she has created a story simultaneously epic and intimate. . . . An ambitious slice of literature, but Orringer fulfills her ambitions with crisp writing. . . . This stunning work manages to feel both original and part and parcel of the well-blazed tradition of historical novels that came before it."
-Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

"Bold, ambitious . . . beautiful, breathtaking and vital. . . . Orringer's prose is unfaltering, and she sh