SCAFFOLDING

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