Scaffolding

The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clementine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn''t sure he''s ready for fatherhood... Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of eric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we''ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who''ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.

Report

Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel...but it is elevated by the writer's elegant, original and often very funny prose New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Product details

• Authors: Lauren Elkin, Elkin Lauren
• Publisher: Chatto and Windus
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 13.06.2024
• EAN: 9781784742942
• ISBN: 978-1-78474-294-2
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 223 mm x 36 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Contemporary literature (from 1945); France, FICTION / Friendship, FICTION / Cultural Heritage, FICTION / Family Life / Marriage & Divorce, Narrative theme: Social issues, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: Politics, Narrative theme: Sense of place, Paris (City), Narrative theme: Love and relationships, c 1970 to c 1979, c 2010 to c 2019, FICTION / Multiple Timelines