One of the 20 Longlisted titles for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011.
On the eve of World War II, two Hungarians meet in Paris and fall in love. But past secrets and the approaching conflict test their devotion to the limit. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer is atmospheric and masterfully told.
Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, an architecture student, has arrived from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to Clara Morgenstern a young widow living in the city. When Andras meets Clara he is drawn deeply into her extraordinary and secret life, just as Europe's unfolding tragedy sends them both into a state of terrifying uncertainty.
From a remote Hungarian village to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labour camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a marriage tested by disaster and of a family, threatened with annihilation, bound by love and history. 'Phenomenal, enthralling ... You don't so much read it as live it' Simon Schama, Financial Times
'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
