The Invisible Bridge

By: Julie Orringer

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Publisher's summary

Julie Orringer’s astonishing first novel, eagerly awaited since the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How to Breathe Underwater (“fiercely beautiful” - The New York Times; “unbelievably good” - Monica Ali), is a grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and Paris, an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by war, and the chronicle of one family’s struggle against the forces that threaten to annihilate it.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret history that will alter the course of his own life. Meanwhile, as his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena and their younger brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. At the end of Andras’s second summer in Paris, all of Europe erupts in a cataclysm of war.

From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s room on the rue des Écoles to the deep and enduring connection he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a love tested by disaster, of brothers whose bonds cannot be broken, of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.

Expertly crafted, magnificently written, emotionally haunting, and impossible to put down, The Invisible Bridge resoundingly confirms Julie Orringer’s place as one of today’s most vital and commanding young literary talents.

©2010 Julie Orringer (P)2010 Random House

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Critic reviews

"One of the best books of the year."—Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“If you’re still looking for a ‘big’ novel to carry into the summer holidays—one in which you can lose yourself without the guilty suspicion that you’re slumming—then Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge is the book you want. . . . Stunning. . . . In every admirable sense an ‘ambitious’ historical novel, in which large human emotions—profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties—play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty. . . . Orringer traverses this perilous rhetorical terrain with remarkable—and, more important, convincing, self-possession. . . . Remarkably affecting. . . . A life powerfully, unsentimentally and inspiringly evoked in this gracefully written and altogether remarkable first novel.”—Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

“The Invisible Bridge deserves to be praised. It takes the introspective themes we’ve loved so well in American literature—from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself to A. M. Homes’s Music for Torching—and points them in a different direction. . . . Rendered in sweeping, epic fashion . . . a close look at the terrible ways that enormous historical events can affect individual lives. . . . The strength of The Invisible Bridge lies in Orringer’s ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world.”—Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

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5 out of 5 stars

By LUCINDA OWEN on 07-19-15

Invisible Bridge

Excellent. First half seems a bit lengthy at the time and upon review but it is an excellent and chilling view of what people lived through at the time. Fascinating and gripping.

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5 out of 5 stars

By Ilene on 02-15-17

A powerful telling of the story

This book was so powerful that it drew out emotion from the deepest part of me at different points in the story. It is not just a story, it is THE story of a horrible time in humanity's history. But the author writes this story so beautifully and the characters are developed in such Detailed and pure way that you feel as if you were experiencing everything right there with them no matter how horrible it is. It is worth the read for it honors all who have come before us and the experience of World War II that was theirs. Blessings

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5 out of 5 stars

By momanna on 05-15-17

A story of great strength

Though a bit long, envisioning the love, life and horrors of Hungarians Jews during WWII was enlightening. I was glad our book club selected this story.

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