From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about the books shortlisted for the 2014 Prize, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Ross Raisin on Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell (1959)

I very rarely re-read any novel, but my impulse upon finishing Mrs Bridge was that I needed to begin it again immediately. Simply for the sentences. The language, always ironic, playful, humorous, is also wonderfully spare. The book manages, in just over a hundred short, chronological chapters, to suggest the empty existential nightmare at the heart of mid 20th Century America in a way that resonates now even more than does Revolutionary Road, or Mildred Pierce. To read it in parallel with Mr Bridge, the novel that Connell wrote ten years later, dealing with the husband, is to enter a marriage in which two people exist side by side, quietly tumbling, together but alone, through a void.