Since her girlhood, Prudence Winship has gazed across the tidal straits from her home in Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan and yearned to bridge the distance. Now, established as the owner of the enormously successful gin distillery she inherited from her father, she can begin to realize her dream.
Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, this is the story of a determined and intelligent woman who is consumed by a vision of a bridge: a gargantuan construction of timber and masonry she devises to cross the East River in a single, magnificent span. With the help of the local surveyor, Benjamin Horsfield, and her sisters-the high-spirited, obstreperous Tem, who works with her in the distillery, and the silent, uncanny Pearl-she fires the imaginations of the people of Brooklyn and New York by promising them a bridge that will meet their most pressing practical needs while being one of the most ambitious public works ever attempted. Prue's own life and the life of the bridge become inextricably bound together as the costs of the bridge, both financial and human, rise beyond her direst expectations.
"Industriously researched . . . No historical novel in recent memory has amassed such an imposing wealth of rich period detail, and few novels of any genre extend an increasingly absorbing story to such a powerful, sorrowful conclusion. A brilliant book that should be a strong Pulitzer Prize contender."
Kirkus Reviews
"[A] magnificent epic. . .Barton's second novel is a breathtaking, heartbreaking mix of gender-busting innovation and the story of decent people living enormous lives in a close family whose secrets lead to explosive tragedy. Highly recommended."
Library Journal
"Emily Barton is a literary inventor on the order of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth. In BROOKLAND, she has made a time machine for us to travel back to Brooklyn in the eighteenth century, where we accompany Prudence Winship on a remarkable apprenticeship and a still more extraordinary career. We'll meet everyone worth knowing, and learn everything worth learning, not only about gin, and bridge-building, but about sisters and fathers and husbands and the power of the imagination to shape the world. Barton's story is patient, tender, encyclopedic and completely absorbing."
Paul LaFarge, author of Haussmann, or the Distinction
