Scaffolding

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Pub Date 13 Jun 2024 | Archive Date 20 Jul 2024

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Description

'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

'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...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781784742942
PRICE £16.99 (GBP)
PAGES 400

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Featured Reviews

The story of two couples whose only connection is that they both live in the same apartment, albeit one couple in the 1970s and the other in the late 2010s. Lauren Elkin's prose is crisp and precise, and she explores the emotional lives of her principal figures with skill. This is not a plot driven novel, and its short, often fragmentary chapters create dream-like moments. Elkin scatters her novel - which us set in Paris - with lots of philosophy, Lacan in particular, and so the novel evokes a certain French style of narrative. There is a lot to admire here, and I fully expect to see the novel on a lot of best of lists at the end of the year.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

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