Barrytown/StationHill Publishing

Originally published in France in 1987, this is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan’s haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult. Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York’s Central Park, where the child’s presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.