Julie Orringer’s astonishing first book, eagerly awaited because the publication of her heralded best-selling short-story collection, How exactly to Breathe Underwater (“fiercely beautiful”-The NY Times; “unbelievably great”-Monica Ali), is normally a grand love story set against the setting of Budapest and Paris, an epic story of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by battle, as well as the chronicle of 1 family’s struggle against the pushes that threaten to annihilate it.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian- about The Invisible Bridge Jewish structures student, gets there from Budapest with a scholarship, an individual suitcase, and a secret letter he has promised to provide to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he falls into a complicated relationship using the letter’s recipient, he becomes aware of a secret history which will alter the course of his personal life. In the mean time, as his elder brother takes up medical research in Modena and their more youthful brother leaves school for the stage, Europe’s unfolding tragedy transmits each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty. By the end of Andras’s second summer time in Paris, all of European countries erupts in a cataclysm of battle.

From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from your lonely chill of Andras’s area in the rue des Écoles to the deep and enduring connection he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, through the despair of Carpathian winter for 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 period of war.

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