Birth of a Bridge

Reminiscent of the sweeping scale of classic American adventure films, this Medici Prize-winning novel chronicles the construction of an immense suspension bridge in a fictional city in California. Maylis de Kerangal interweaves the stories of a dozen men and women from the consortium of workers who converge on the site. With their various nationalities and social classes, these engineers, designers, divers, overseers, and protesters present a microcosm of not just California, but of humanity as a whole. Their collective effort to realize the megaproject recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate-and to radically transform-our world through built form. Kerangal's writing has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. The style of her prose is rich and innovative, playing with different registers (from the most highly literary to the most colloquial slang), taking risks and inventing words, and playing with speed and tension through grammatical ellipsis and elision. She employs a huge vocabulary and, most strikingly, brings together words not often combined to evoke startling comparisons. Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French. Her most recent, Naissance d'un pont / Birth of a Bridge, won not only the Medici Prize but also the Franz Hessel Prize. She lives in Paris, France. Jessica Moore is the author of Everything, Now, part lyric, part memoir, as well as a translation of Jean-Francois Beauchemin's Turkana Boy. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.