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.
Heartbreaking—and inspiring.
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.
Brilliant…. Remarkably accomplished.
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.
Dazzling…. A story simultaneously epic and intimate.
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.
Beautiful, breathtaking, and vital.
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.
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.
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.
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.