Bridge of Clay was released in the United States and Australia on 9 October 2018, [2] and in the United Kingdom on 11 October 2018. [3] Plot [ edit ] Bridge of Clay is the intensity of the prose - the potency of the heartbreak. The depth of grief and loss is so palpable you can all but feel the blood, sweat, and tears that went into crafting the story. Zusak ably conjures the chaos of family life and the scars of abandonment; the way memory and tragedy inform the story reads, at times, nothing short of visceral.' Entertainment Weekly This is a story about family and the narratives that underlie them. The idea of personal history forms such a central part of the plot and the novel’s structure. The chronology of Bridge of Clay drifts around, from the story of Penelope – the Dunbar’s mother – to the history of Michael – their father – to Matthew’s present-day writing of the narrative, to the eleven years earlier that Clay left school to help ‘the Murderer’ build his bridge. It is an expansive story and, admittedly, the elliptical nature of the various revelations and histories can be a little tough to follow in places. However, this is something that Zusak pursued consciously: “You have to do a bit more work but I think the rewards are greater, too” ( Entertainment Weekly). For me, the payoff is most definitely worth the patience required as the various narrative threads come together. First of all I must say reading this book is hard work. It is a history of a family presented like a patchwork quilt - a bit here and a bit there, jumping around from person to person, place to place and past to present. Concentration is the key. I found the ramped-up testosterone of every Dunbar boy tiresome - not a single one of them is anything but Hypermasculine.

Meet Markus Zusak on his US tour". Penguin-Random House. 2 October 2018 . Retrieved 10 November 2018. After 11 or 12 years of waiting, you’d think that the author will write the next big thing. Unfortunately he wrote the next big disappointment and I fell from this Bridge of Clay into a sea of disappointment! Mystical and loaded with heart, it’s another gorgeous tearjerker from a rising master of them.” — Entertainment Weekly It’s this gradual build up that leads to the emotional pay-off as they proceed towards the tragedy you know is coming. That terrible feeling where you know something awful is bound to happen, and there is nothing you can do, so you just don’t want to deny it for a little bit longer... It’s the feeling the characters feel, and thanks to Zusaks brilliant set up, you feel it with them. The Book Thief 10 Years Later: Markus Zusak Reflects on His Iconic Novel 14 March 2016". Paste Magazine . Retrieved 28 March 2017.Deserves a place on the shelf with the Diary of Anne Frank. . . Poised to become a classic.”— USA Today Both parents were readers, for their mother it was The Iliad and the Odyssey, for their father it was the Quarryman. The books are mentioned often and have great significance in the parents’ lives and that of the Dunbar boys. They were also great storytellers passing down to the boys not only their love of books but the stories of their own lives. It is Clay, the quiet one, who will build a bridge; for his family, for his past, for his sins. He builds a bridge to transcend humanness. To survive. I have a customer that comes into work every Thursday. His name is Doug and we bonded over Markus Zusak and over the last eight months we've become really great friends. I lent him copy of this book to read and he left little notes throughout it and it's a copy I will treasure forever. And soon we're going to go and meet Markus Zusak at a book event and we're so excited. These books have changed my life and they've also introduced wonderful people to me too.

In a complex narrative that leaps through time and place and across oceans, Zusak paints a vivid portrait of the brothers trying to regain their balance by keeping their family’s story alive.”— Time Truth to be told, I wasn’t very interested in the synopsis but October was my Contemporary month and what is better to read than a novel by the highly acclaimed author of The Book Thief aka one of my favorite books! I found the "twist" ultra-tiresome and not even remotely satisfying in its proposed emotional payoff. Books and reading figure strongly with the boys, who love the stories of the classics, especially the Odyssey and ancient history. Clay begs to hear his mother’s stories, often just family anecdotes, and he seems a little simple at first. Only at first. There’s a lot more to him. He does become the bridge in the family even as he helps to physically build a real bridge with stone arches and all. But while in other books you could have read the book in one sitting - with some effort -, here the journey of the Dunbar boys is also the journey of the reader, who has to convince himself to keep going at least five times only in the first half.OK, markus, this sounds amazing and all, and i understand that you wrote the book thief, but REALLY? 26 dollars? for a YA book? Thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK for the preview copy, and special thanks to Markus Zusak for bringing the Dunbar boys to life.

Tommy Dunbar – the fifth and youngest Dunbar boy. Characterised by his love for animals and the works of Homer, which is shown through the names of the family pets; Agamemnon (the fish), Hector (the cat), Achilles (the mule) and Telemachus (the budgie).When Bridge of Clay was announced on Goodreads close to a decade ago, some users immediately rated it, assuming Zusak's novel would be as life-altering as his magnum opus, The Book Thief. Anticipation was riding high about Bridge of Clay. It was going to be epic! The grief that transcends this novel is palpable. Although death does not haunt this novel as visibly as with The Book Thief, it is there nonetheless. There are moments of such raw potency, it is almost hard to read on. The loud, direct strength of Penelope – a woman who has endured and lost so much – juxtaposed with Michael’s quiet resignation and desperate sadness are tangibly painful. Yet, the healing capacity of stories and the understanding that they bring offers a hope that tempers the novel’s hardest moments. As Zusak explained in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly: “We’re all made up of so many things. We’re made up of stories – not only the stories of our lives, but the stories of lives that came before our lives. Clay builds the bridge and it’s made of him, but so much of him is made of his mother’s and father’s stories.”As Clay, through Matthew’s narration, weaves the stories of his families together, he creates a history that mirrors the expansiveness of the Greek legends that Penelope so loved. In fact, the first part of the book is a trundling, elliptical orgasm that strings along a bunch of words about a murderer and a mule and some animals named after characters in The Odyssey. It's initially intriguing, but it wears out its welcome fast when the pretension (not tension) continues to build and it becomes super obvious both who the murderer is and that Zusak is essentially exploring identical themes he already wrote about in - you guessed it - The Book Thief.