How to Breathe Underwater

Julie Orringer was born in 1973 and grew up in New Orleans and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Cornell University. Her stories have appeared in several publications including The Paris Review, The Yale Review and Best New American Voices. Julie Orringer lives in San Francisco where she is currently at work on a novel. How to Breathe Underwater is her first book.

In her dazzling first book Julie Orringer dives into the private world of childhood and immerses us in its fears and longings: the jealous friendships and the bitter sibling battles; the parents that row and the boys that won't dance with you. Then, in a voice that is equally tender and compassionate, she reminds us of those rare, exhilarating moments of victory. 
 
'Unbelievably good: the humiliations and cruelties and passions of childhood, sparkling fresh prose, a writer with a big heart and an acute sense of the small things that loom large in our lives' Monica Ali, Guardian

Julie Orringer

A big, generously involving story, utterly convincing in its texture and detail. Beautiful and sad

Powerful and affecting, crowded with the details of lives led and miseries inflicted

There are characters whose fate we care about, and a profoundly moving love story threaded between the tenacity of family and the monstrous grind of war. One that cries for you to linger over page by enthralling page

Stunning, gracefully written, altogether remarkable

A sweeping epic, a good old-fashioned page-turner

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 
 
Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, an architecture student, has arrived from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to Clara Morgenstern a young widow living in the city. When Andras meets Clara he is drawn deeply into her extraordinary and secret life, just as Europe's unfolding tragedy sends them both into a state of terrifying uncertainty. 
 
From a remote Hungarian village to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labour camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a marriage tested by disaster and of a family, threatened with annihilation, bound by love and history.

Julie Orringer

Praise for The Invisible Bridge

A big, generously involving story, utterly convincing in its texture and detail. Beautiful and sad

Compelling, passionate, tragic

Powerful and affecting, crowded with the details of lives led and miseries inflicted

A big, generously involving story, utterly convincing in its texture and detail. Beautiful and sad

Compelling, passionate, tragic

Powerful and affecting, crowded with the details of lives led and miseries inflicted

A big, generously involving story, utterly convincing in its texture and detail. Beautiful and sad

Compelling, passionate, tragic

Powerful and affecting, crowded with the details of lives led and miseries inflicted

Books by Julie Orringer

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