Bridge

Winner of the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction

Set in modern-day San Francisco, this obsessive work of fiction probes the stormy life of Alice, a passionate and whip-smart young woman who works at a law firm. Alice faces despair and occasional rapture as she struggles with simultaneously real and hallucinated relationships, including a tumultuous romance with her co-worker David, and an escalating war with her supervisor Fran. In lyrical prose, Bridge exposes a raw, brilliant, and furious mind as it treads the jagged terrain of mental illness, murder, and suicide—to be or not to be.

—Eleanor Wilner, Ploughshares: “Ever wonder what that quiet girl in the office is thinking?...”

—Tony Hoagland: “Thomas’s combination of sheer lyricism and incisive edginess…”

—Laura Kasischke: “Robert Thomas has done the nearly impossible in this age…”

—Robin Black: “A novel that is not merely enjoyable, or absorbing, but a revelation…”

—San Francisco Chronicle: “What happens in the story is minimal, but how it happens is striking…”

—Publishers Weekly: “Crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs…”

—Kirkus Review: “Alice—a lonely, at times suicidal woman—narrates the minutiae of her life with insight and wit…”

—Bookslut: “An engaging, meandering exploration of the mind of the novel’s protagonist…”