News: The Invisible Bridge

The Invisible Bridge is dense with a master’s intelligence…. The stuff of classic novels.

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.

Wry, poignant. . . . Such clear-eyed precision makes Orringer’s debut as heartbreaking as it is clever.

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.

Profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty…. A stunning first novel.

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.

Truly breathtaking…. A sensual feast.

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.

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

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.

Orringer’s writing is glorious.

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

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.

A work of impressive scope and powerful depth.

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.