Mrs Bridge

Evan S. Connell was born in Kansas City in 1924. He served in the US navy in the Second World War and lived briefly in Paris before returning to the US, where he wrote and supported himself with odd jobs. His incredibly varied books range from long experimental poems to a best-selling biography of General Custer, but he will be remembered above all for his two masterpieces about middle-class, suburban American life: Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. In 2009 he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He died in New Mexico in 2013.

How it is done I only wish I knew -- Dorothy Parker Esquire It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly Daily Telegraph I've re-read about two books in my entire life, and this is the first time that I have finished reading something and then immediately returned to the beginning to read it again. It's incredible. It's one of the best books I've ever read -- Ross Raisin, Author Of 'god's Own Country' And 'waterline' Intimate ... affecting ... very funny ... Mrs Bridge is a reflection of you and me, an exemplar of our shared humanity -- Joshua Ferris, Author Of 'then We Came To The End' And 'the Unnamed' Written from a kind of tilted, ironic angle, it's often very funny... and if this were all Mrs Bridge was, it would still be one of the sharper novels about mid-20th-century domestic life. But Mrs Bridge is so much more than that...It's a book that is smart and knowing and makes its reader feel as if they're in on a joke, while at the same time gradually coaxing them to feel more and more empathy for its vaguely absurd main character, and ultimately playing them like an emotional Stradivarius Guardian Connell never mocks or condescends, but wrings every drop of comedy and pathos from his hidebound heroine's predicament Sunday Telegraph Evan S. Connell's portrayal of the decline and fall of a 1950s Kansas City housewife charts perfectly the tragedy of the unexamined life Observer An exquisite mixture of sympathy and ironic detachment...Connell's writing has a terse, hard-bitten flavour, but the chapters tend to resolve themselves into resonant, Austen-like aphorisms: "While marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not." Independent For all their satire and dark implications, the novels of the Bridge family remain in the memory as triumphs of faultless realism. Mr. Connell's art is one of restraint and perfect

If you have already read it, that's wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven't read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that's wonderful too, because you are still lucky enough to be able to read it for the first time ... A perfect novel ... What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true .... Mrs Bridge is one of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up Meg Wolitzter The New York Times