Scaffolding

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The debut novel from the brilliant essayist, reviewer, cultural critic and author of Flaneuse 'The Susan Sontag of her generation' Deborah Levy Two couples inhabit the same apartment in 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. 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 ric 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

Reviews

'An unabashedly philosophical novel one that keeps the reader hooked by the sensuality of its prose' * Erica Wagner, Financial Times *
Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideasThe prose is as well crafted as Elkins nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did * Guardian *
Scaffolding is a multi-layered, intelligent novel * 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 *
Scaffolding is an ambitious, multi-generational book that reckons with legacy and feminist resistancetruly fascinating a provocative study * i *

Author Bio

Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Fl neuse- Women Walk the City, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.