Mr Bridge

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The companion novel to Mrs Bridge, this is a pitch-perfect portrayal of marriage and family life and a poignant dissection of the unexamined life. 
 
Walter Bridge, husband to India and father to three, is a successful lawyer in a Kansas suburb. The daily 
dramas of his life only serve to illuminate his narrow prejudices and complacent outlook, yet he is also troubled by existential doubts, dark undercurrents of desire and a yearning for something forever out of his reach. In Mr Bridge, Evan S. Connell gives us a moving, satirical and poetic portrayal of a man who cannot escape his limitations and of a couple growing old together but unable, ultimately, to connect. 
 
The companion novel, Mrs Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'With a delicate and subtle irony, Mr Connell shows us, first from her, then from his point of view, the little daily dramas of this ordinary family. It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly' Daily Telegraph

Mr Bridge is a tour-de-force of contemporary American realism, a beautiful work of fiction

With a delicate and subtle irony, Mr Connell shows us, first from her, then from his point of view, the little daily dramas of this ordinary family. It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are forever human, forever vulnerable, forever pitiable. In spare, whimsical, ironic prose, Connell exposes each and every one of their wrinkles and then, in the end, offers them to us as human beings to be cherished

Evan S. Connell was born in Kansas City in 1924. He served in the US navy in the Second World War and lived briefly in Paris before returning to the US, where he wrote and supported himself with odd jobs. His incredibly varied books range from long experimental poems to a best-selling biography of General Custer, but he will be remembered above all for his two masterpieces about middle-class, suburban American life: Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. In 2009 he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He died in New Mexico in 2013.

Walter Bridge, husband to India and father to three, is a successful lawyer in a Kansas suburb. The daily dramas of his life only serve to illuminate his narrow prejudices and complacent outlook, yet he is also troubled by dark undercurrents of desire and a yearning for something forever out of his reach. In Mr Bridge, Evan S. Connell gives us a poignant, satirical and poetic portrayal of a man who cannot escape his limitations and of a couple growing old together but unable, ultimately, to connect.

El Dorado And Other Pursuits

'Crème de la crème of world adventuring' - New York Times Book Review

Quite simply, a great book... Combining the poet's vision with the narrative sweep of a born storyteller and painstaking historical research, Connell revives the lost sense of awe and wonder that, along with the misery and privation, must have marked these epic voyages of body and mind

Connell is one of those exuberant American historians who believe so passionately that everything must be fun that the reader sometimes pines for a piece of dry gravitas. Nevertheless, these essays, on a theme of exploration, contain enough rattling yarns to silence even this cynic

A survey of great feats of exploration, a compendium of a lifetime's reading of adventure, a book of wonders, florid history, provisional 'facts' and catchy ironies, laconic heroism and scabrous villainies, cryptic deaths and other endings

Evan S. Connell, recognised as one of the most important voices in American literature, was the author of seventeen books, including Mrs Bridge, Mr Bridge and the bestselling Son of the Morning Star, his account of Custer's final battle at the Little Big Horn, and his book about the crusades, Deus lo Volt! In 2009 he was nominated for the Man Booker international prize. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico and died in 2010, aged 88.

Evan S. Connell explores the quixotic obsession with the new, the hidden, the unattainable that burns in an individual's soul. 
 
Each essay is an extraordinary account of passionate pursuit by legendary explorers, visionaries, and seekers compelled by a singular desire. Here we find Marco Polo, El Dorado, Paracelsus, Columbus, the thousands of children in the Innocents' Crusade, Magellan, Mary Kingsley (a Victorian naturalist, ethnologist, sailor, scholar, and guest of cannibals, and Ibn Batuta (an indefatigable explorer of the fourteenth century whose travels in the Arab world and beyond made 'the journey of Marco Polo look like a stroll around the block'). 
 
'There's no end to the list, of course,' Connell adds, 'because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard.'

The White Lantern And Other Pursuits

Evan S. Connell, long recognized as one of the most important American literary voices, is the author of seventeen books, including the bestselling Son of the Morning Star, his account of Custer's final battle at the Little Big Horn, Deus lo Volt! and El Dorado &amp; Other Pursuits ( all available in Pimlico), and Mrs. Bridge. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Never has master storyteller Evan Connell been more enthralling than in these incandescent pages - tales of real-life adventure ranging from the archaeology of Olduvai gorge to the exploration of the Antarctic; from Viking voyages to an Ice Age xylophone. Never has reality so far surpassed mere fiction or fantasy than in this magnificent volume.

General Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn

Son Of The Morning Star

One of the greatest works of the American West  - 'A new American classic.' Time

Evan S. Connell, long recognised as one of the most important American literary voices, is the author of seventeen books, including Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, Deus lo Volt:  A Chronicle of the Crusades and El Dorado & Other Pursuits (both available in Pimlico).  He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

On a scorching June Sunday in 1876, thousands of Indian warriors - Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho - converged on a grassy ridge above the valley of Montana's Little Bighorn River.  On the ridge five companies of United States cavalry - 262 soldiers, comprising officers and troopers - fought desperately but hopelessly.  When the guns fell silent, no soldier - including their commanding officer, Lt Col. George Armstrong Custer - had survived. Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history - 130 years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn.  Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as 'one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers', wrote what continues to be the most reliable - and compulsively readable - account of the subject.  Connell makes good use of his research and novelist's eye for story and detail to re-create the heroism, foolishness and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

A Chronicle of the Crusades

Deus Lo Volt!

'A vivid narrative.this book captures the pungent flavour of the period and makes for an exciting and sometimes shocking read.'  Lawrence James, Daily Mail

The year is 1095.  The most prominent leaders of the Christian world have assembled in a meadow in France near Clermont.  Pope Urban appeals for the liberation of Jerusalem and cries out Deus lo volt!, God Wills It!  The cry is taken up, echoes forth and is carried on.Wave upon wave of Christian pilgrims rush to assault the growing power of Muslims in the Holy Land and will do so for the next two hundred years.  Most able men become soldiers of the Cross, and when a man is prevented by old age or ill health, he sends his son.  Women, too, go to fight alongside the men.  It is a time of great adventure, of great exploration and cultural change.  Uniting Christian Europe in a common cause, the crusades defined forever the spirit of the West.A magisterial recounting of this great and terrible campaign, Deus lo Volt! tells with stunning immediacy one soldier's first-hand experience of the defining war of Christendom.

Evan S Connell

If you have already read it, that's wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven't read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that's wonderful too, because you are still lucky enough to be able to read it for the first time ... A perfect novel ... What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true .... Mrs Bridge is one of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up

This is the first time that I have finished reading something and then immediately returned to the beginning to read it again.  It's incredible.  It's one of the best books I've ever read

Ross Raisin, author of 'God's Own Country' and 'Waterline'

It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly

Written from a kind of tilted, ironic angle, it's often very funny... and if this were all Mrs Bridge was, it would still be one of the sharper novels about mid-20th-century domestic life. But Mrs Bridge is so much more than that...It's a book that is smart and knowing and makes its reader feel as if they're in on a joke, while at the same time gradually coaxing them to feel more and more empathy for its vaguely absurd main character, and ultimately playing them like an emotional Stradivarius

Intimate ... affecting ... very funny ... Mrs Bridge is a reflection of you and me, an exemplar of our shared humanity

Joshua Ferris, author of 'Then We Came to the End' and 'The Unnamed'

Connell never mocks or condescends, but wrings every drop of comedy and pathos from his hidebound heroine's predicament

Evan S. Connell's portrayal of the decline and fall of a 1950s Kansas City housewife charts perfectly the tragedy of the unexamined life

An exquisite mixture of sympathy and ironic detachment ... Connell's writing has a terse, hard-bitten flavour, but the chapters tend to resolve themselves into resonant, Austen-like aphorisms: "While marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not"

Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty.

Evan S Connell

Praise for Mrs Bridge

If you have already read it, that's wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven't read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that's wonderful too, because y ...

This is the first time that I have finished reading something and then immediately returned to the beginning to read it again. It's incredible. It's one of the best books I've ever read

How it is done I only wish I knew

If you have already read it, that's wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven't read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that's wonderful too, because y ...

This is the first time that I have finished reading something and then immediately returned to the beginning to read it again. It's incredible. It's one of the best books I've ever read

How it is done I only wish I knew

If you have already read it, that's wonderful, for chances are you love it too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven't read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that's wonderful too, because y ...

This is the first time that I have finished reading something and then immediately returned to the beginning to read it again. It's incredible. It's one of the best books I've ever read

How it is done I only wish I knew

Books by Evan S Connell

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