Bridge

A grieving daughter’s search for her mother becomes a journey across alternate realities in this "ass-kicking, mind-bending" new thriller from the author of the The Shining Girls (Kirkus Reviews).

There are infinite realities. She's looking for one . . . 

Twenty-four-year-old Bridge is paralyzed by choices: all the other lives she could have lived, the decisions she could have made. And now, who she should be in the wake of her mother’s unexpected death.

Jo was a maverick neuroscientist fixated on an artifact she called the “dreamworm” that she believed could open the doors to other worlds. It was part of Jo’s grand delusion, her sickness, and it cost her everything, including her relationship with her daughter.

But in packing up Jo’s house, Bridge discovers Jo’s obsession hidden amongst her things. And the dreamworm works, exactly the way it’s supposed to, the way Bridge remembers from when she was a little girl. Suddenly Bridge can step into other realities, otherselves. In one of them, could she find out what really happened to her mother? What Bridge doesn’t know is that there are others hunting for the dreamworm—who will kill to get their hands on it. 

Bridge is a highly original, reality-bending thrill-ride that could only have come from the brilliant mind of award-winning novelist, Lauren Beukes, about mothers and daughters, hunters and seekers, and who we each choose to be. 

"Sheer thrilling madness with a big, beating heart that reminds us we're all connected." —Grady Hendrix

"A fantastic high-wire act of a novel . . . at once a cosmic narrative and a deeply intimate human story." —Catriona Ward

"Spiders out into alternate universes, alternate selves, yet manages to be very much about us and our fractured now." —Paul Tremblay

"Lauren Beukes is a major, major talent." —George R. R. Martin

• “Lauren Beukes' multiverse is sheer thrilling madness with a big, beating heart that reminds us that we're all connected in the end.”—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and How To Sell a Haunted House
• "Lauren Beukes takes a story filled with psychedelic drugs, parallel worlds, and neuroscience and makes it also about a complex mother-daughter relationship, full of darkness, light, and longing. This is fun and insane and very moving."
   —Mariana Enriquez, author of Our Share of Night
• “I absolutely loved it. This fantastic high-wire act of a novel, accelerating to a heart-stopping climax, is at once a cosmic narrative on a grand scale and a deeply intimate human story."—Catriona Ward, bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street
• "Bridge spiders out into alternate universes, alternate selves, yet manages to be very much about us and our fractured now. It's a humane, thought-provoking puzzle box, and a wildly entertaining novel."—Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club
• “What if our dreams are twisted-up memories? What if the Mandela Effect isn’t an effect at all? Somewhere between The Lathe of Heaven and Everything Everywhere All at Once is Lauren Beukes' Bridge: it’s not just reality that’s multifold, it’s identity. Bridge challenges our sense of reality, chips away at our conception of the self, and shoves us down a slide of our own paranoia. But, it’s Lauren Beukes—this is what she does, isn’t it?”—Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians
• Praise for Afterland
• “A smartly written thriller that opens with a satisfying bang . . . Beukes is all about turning assumptions and expectations upside down.”
   —Stephen King, New York Times Book Review, on Afterland
• "Bowstring-taut, visceral, and incredibly timely: Beukes's plague-tale is a parable about the glory and terror of Americanism in times of calamity."—Cory Doctorow, author of Walkaway and Little Brother, on Afterland
• "Beukes's imagined world [is] a thrilling setting for an examination of maternal love."—Joumana Khatib, New York Times, on Afterland
• “A post-apocalyptic thrill-ride."—O, The Oprah Magazine, on Afterland