Scaffolding
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:13th Jun '24
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£9.99(9781529932942)
'The Susan Sontag of her generation' Deborah Levy
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 Clémentine 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. 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 Éric 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.
'Atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised' Observer
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* *
Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed * Stylist *
[Scaffolding is] atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised * Observer, *Books to Look Out For 2024* *
Scaffolding is an ambitious, multi-generational book that reckons with legacy and feminist resistance…truly fascinating… a provocative study * i *
'Lauren Elkin is a writer than can jump between genres so seamlessly, she deserves to be a household name...Elkin continues to dazzle with her keen observations and reflective prose' * Glamour *
'An unabashedly philosophical novel — one that keeps the reader hooked by the sensuality of its prose' * Erica Wagner, Financial Times *
Elkin’s first novel is a brainy sex comedy… Scaffolding joins books by Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy, and as an erudite lust quadrilateral interested in ethical quandaries… There’s no shortage of excitement in the twists supplied by what each character doesn’t know (or chooses to hide or ignore) about one another * Observer *
A compelling work of fiction… the book will linger long in the reader’s heart and mind * Harper's Bazaar *
[Scaffolding] unspools layers of psychic history to ask questions about the nature of desire and the possibility, or not, of intimacy…Anna’s first-person vice…is immersive. The conversations she reports feel authentic, with mundanities jostling up against profundities * Times Literary Supplement *
Scaffolding shows off Elkin’s rich, scholarly mind to great effect… a book laden with lust and desire… I expect to see Elkin’s debut feature on many end-of-year lists, and deservedly so * Frieze *
ISBN: 9781784742942
Dimensions: 224mm x 146mm x 36mm
Weight: 501g
400 pages