Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (HC)

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.

REVIEWS

"Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas…The prose is as well crafted as Elkin’s nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed… Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did." ― Guardian

"Scaffolding is a multi-layered, intelligent novel."― i

"Lauren Elkin is a writer than can jump between genres so seamlessly, she deserves to be a household name...Elkin continues to dazzle with her keen observations and reflective prose." ― Glamour

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
ISBN:  978-1784742942
Pages: 400