Some structures are so grand and defining that it’s hard to imagine they haven’t always been there. But as Wellcome prize-winner Kerangal shows in her striking 2010 novel, translated by Jessica Moore, the bigger the project, the bigger the story. Her setting is Coca, a fictional California city that sits beside a vast river, “a long golden cobra lazing and wild, lying curved like a trigger across an entire continent”. Few locals seem to need a new crossing, but ambition and money talk, and plans are made for a suspension bridge 6,200ft long and 100ft wide that will put Coca on the map. The result is a feverish coming together of men, women and technology as project managers, construction workers and hangers-on swarm, and great machines tear the earth and inch their way into the sky. Kerangal has a fine ear for the hubbub, spinning epic, comma-flecked sentences into a symphony of human drama and mechanical ingenuity. There’s sorrow, for the way lives are uprooted and the land colonised, but there’s a tremendous, jubilant energy too, in a book that sings of global development in all its ugliness and glory.
• Birth of a Bridge is published by MacLehose. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
