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The Bridge

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What to expect

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Long Island

'A writer at the height of his considerable powers' – The Guardian
'A giant amongst storytellers' – The Telegraph
'One of our finest contemporary writers' – New Yorker

Beautifully read by the author, Colm Tóibín.

Miquel and his father are living an uneasy life together in his mother's house in the Pyrenees, the house she had been returning to on the day she died. A new bridge, connecting the two valleys, is almost complete, which will end the valley's isolation and create an easier route to smuggle contraband deep into the mountains. Where Miquel's father imagines opportunity, Miquel foresees disaster and an exposure to the outside world for which his father is desperately unprepared.

Colm Tóibín's exhilarating short novel contains vast inner and outer worlds within its pages. With meticulous precision and an unerring eye Tóibín captures lives caught between the past and the present, and the journey of a young man seeking connection, haunted by loss.

Critics Review

A spare chronicle of longing and grief
Guardian
He has an almost uncanny ability to inhabit the interior lives of his characters with an absolute lack of sentimentality or judgment
TLS
What makes Tóibín one of our finest contemporary writers is his dual power as a fierce cultural critic and a novelist of immense, delicate intuition. He operates with a journalist’s eye for hard fact and a poet’s ear for the weight of a pause
New Yorker
Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains . . . Tóibín’s unsentimental prose is flawlessly matched to the austere worlds of people enduring, in their different ways, lives stripped back to the bone
The Guardian
Author Colm Toibin
Narrator Colm Tóibín
Duration 2 hours and 22 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781037418556
Format Audiobook
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Genre Family life fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Historical fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss
Availability GB, IE

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