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.
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
*The New York Times*
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'*
How it is done I only wish I knew
*Esquire*
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*
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
*Guardian*
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
*Sunday Telegraph*
Evan S. Connell's portrayal of the decline and fall of a 1950s
Kansas City housewife charts perfectly the tragedy of the
unexamined life
*Observer*
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"
*Independent*
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