The Invisible Bridge

Julie Orringer’s astonishing first novel, eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater is a grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and Paris, an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by war, and the chronicle of one family’s struggle against the forces that threaten to annihilate it.

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 falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. At the end of Andras’s second summer in Paris, all of Europe erupts in a cataclysm of war.

From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s room on the rue des Écoles to the deep and enduring connection he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a love tested by disaster, of brothers whose bonds cannot be broken, of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.

Expertly crafted, magnificently written, emotionally haunting, and impossible to put down, The Invisible Bridge resoundingly confirms Julie Orringer’s place as one of today’s most vital and commanding young literary talents.

Praise & Reviews

“Profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty…. A stunning first novel.”
— Los Angeles Times



“Truly breathtaking…. A sensual feast.”
— San Francisco Chronicle



“The Invisible Bridge is a tale of war-torn lovers, family and survival of the luckiest rather than the fittest…. Wonderfully evoked.”
— Chicago Tribune



“Orringer’s writing is glorious.”
— The Oregonian



“At the risk of oversimplifying things, this novel shows how Michael Chabon would write if he grew up a ballet-dancing girl instead of a comic-book-loving boy.”
— The Plain Dealer



“Orringer makes us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world. For the time it takes to read this fine novel, and for a long time afterward, it becomes our world too.”
— The New York Times Book Review



“One of the best books of the year.”
— Junot Diaz

“An unforgettable, important work…. Extraordinary.”
— Miami Herald



“Heartbreaking—and inspiring.”
— Chicago Sun-Times



“Brilliant…. Remarkably accomplished.”
— The Washington Post Book World

“Dazzling…. A story simultaneously epic and intimate.”
— Entertainment Weekly



“Beautiful, breathtaking, and vital.”
— NPR, “Books We Like”

“The word ‘epic’ seems inadequate to describe Julie Orringer’s phenomenal first novel, The Invisible Bridge. You don’t so much read it as live it…. Profoundly moving…. This is one that cries for you to linger over it, page by enthralling page.”
— Financial Times

“Powerful…. So mesmerizing that in spite of the book’s heft, its ending comes too soon.”
— Miami Herald

“The Invisible Bridge is dense with a master’s intelligence…. The stuff of classic novels.” 
— Kansas City Star
“With The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer has built a large novel in the grand old style, and out of that rubble made something new and beautiful.”
— The Onion’s A. V. Club

“Engrossing…. The Invisible Bridge follows Hungarian Architecture student Andras Lévi and his older lover, Klara Morgenstern, through some of the most fraught and consequential years of 20th-century history, but Orringer never seems out of her depth.”
— Time Out New York 

“Orringer’s great achievement here is to give us the Holocaust anew, to remind us of the scale of what was lost and to cherish what survived.”
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer



“A Tolstoy-esque novel of the Holocaust, one that tracks the passage of quotidian life and the flutter of the human heart against the implacable roll of history. . . . The love story that unfolds in Orringer’s pages is as romantic as Doctor Zhivago and the seamless, edifying integration of truckloads of historical and topical research.”
— Newsday



“As rich in historical detail as it is human in its cast of sympathetic characters…. Speaks to the power of love and the steadfastness of the heart.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine

“Andras’s Europe is fully realized: its cornices and cobblestones, its frigid winters and chance meetings in cafés.” 
— Bookforum



“A work of impressive scope and powerful depth.”
— BookPage



“In a field as crowded with artistic representations as the Holocaust, it’s easy to assume that there is nothing new to say. Julie Orringer reminds us that there always is, so long as there are individual stories to tell…. Brilliant…. As in her modern stories, here Orringer covers the darkest matters with a tender authority while imbuing her characters with the subtle, endless dimensions of love and suffering…. Gripping, fresh, and worth remembering… this novel will endure.”
— Forward magazine

“Has much to say about war, and how it affects individuals indiscriminately, changing their dreams.”
— Dallas Morning News



“What begins as a jewel-box romance soon breaks open into a harrowing saga of war. Orringer, drawing upon assiduous research into Hungarian history (and her own), conveys a piercing sense of what it means to be fated by one’s blood, as well as a rich understanding ot the capricious nature of survival.”
— Vogue



“The sheer joy of storytelling fills each moment of Orringer’s novel. Like Tolstoy and Eliot’s work, it transports us completely into its world—that of young Andras, his friends, family and loves—and a landscape of war and redemption. Thrilling, tender, and terrifying; a glorious reminder of how books can change our lives. It is the novel of the year.”
—Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of A Marriage



“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, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“Orringer avoids bathos and has a gift for re-creating distant times and places: a Paris suffused with the scent of paprikas and the sounds of American jazz, the camraderies and cruelties of the work camps. The ticking clock of history keeps it urgent and moving forward, and the result is, against all odds, a Holocaust page-turner. Buy it.”
— New York magazine

“Orringer’s stunning first novel far exceeds the expectations generated by her much-lauded debut collection, How to Breathe Underwater. . . . Orringer’s triumphant novel is as much a lucid reminder of a time not so far away as it is a luminous story about the redemptive power of love.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review, pick of the week)

“A hugely ambitious undertaking, but [Orringer] has every detail under control, from the architectural currents in Europe in the 1930s to the day-to-day struggle to survive…Completely absorbing…an astonishing achievement.”
—Mary Ellen Quinn, Booklist (starred review)