The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

The Invisible Bridge

Julie Orringer

Although daunting in size, this book is delicious to read. It's a haunting, beautiful tale of the tragedies of war, the horrors of antisemitism, but most of all it's a love story. Masterfully told, it's loaded with fascinating historical details as well as emotional intensity, and I felt as if I lived several lifetimes through these characters who became very dear to me. Just wonderful!

Extract
His father followed him out of the bar and they walked together in the blue light of evening. All along the avenue, yellow streetlamps had come on to illuminate the buildings with their flaking plaster and faded paint. He didn't think about where he was walking; he wished he could walk faster, lose his father in the dusk, but the fact was that he was exhausted, anemic, and in need of sleep. He pressed onward past the Aranybika Hotel, an aging dowager in white wooden lace; he walked past the double towers of the Lutheran church with its stolid spires. He kept walking, head down, all the way to the park across the street from the Deri Museum, a squat Baroque-style building clad in yellow stucco. The April evening, soft at the edges, reminded him of a thousand evenings he'd spent here as a schoolboy, with friends or alone, worrying the edges of his adolescent problems like the pages of favorite books.
Parallels
  • The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos
  • Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz