Fowler Public Library

Construction engineer Bartley Alexander is a troubled, middle-aged man torn between Winifred, his American wife - a cold woman with clearly defined standards - and Hilda Burgoyne - an alluring mistress in London who has helped him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. Alexander's relationship with Hilda gnaws away at his sense of propriety and honor and eventually proves disastrous. (He is with Hilda when a messenger, unable to find him, fails...

May 31, 1883, 3:55 p.m. Twenty thousand men, women, and children, their faces shining in the late afternoon sun, are strolling the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Brooklyn Bridge is open just a week, its promenade a magnet for the teeming masses of New York and Brooklyn. Anxious to escape the heat, overcrowding, and disease of the tenements, thousands stream onto the soaring span. To breathe free, high above the choking confines of the city is an...

Robert and his friend Charlie are proud of their fathers, who are working on the construction of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Although it will mean that their father can no longer make a living running a ferry boat, thirteen-year-old Mark and his brother Luke are excited about the building of a five-mile bridge across the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan in 1957.

From Maylis de Kerangal comes this story of a dozen men and women éngineers, designers, machinery operators, cable riggers áll employees of an international consortium charged with building a bridge somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California. Their collective effort to complete the megaproject recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate ánd to radically transform óur world through built form, with all the dramatic tension...