The Suspension Bridge
by Anna Dowdall
Paperback (Fiction)
5.5" x 8.5”
282 pages
Release Date: October 15 2024
ISBN: 9781998926121
by Anna Dowdall
Paperback (Fiction)
5.5" x 8.5”
282 pages
Release Date: October 15 2024
ISBN: 9781998926121
by Anna Dowdall
Paperback (Fiction)
5.5" x 8.5”
282 pages
Release Date: October 15 2024
ISBN: 9781998926121
A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, The Suspension Bridge takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world’s biggest bridge. The newly-arrived Sister Harriet navigates a chaotic first year at upscale Saint Reginald’s Academy, where the mysterious disappearance of boarding students complicates her ongoing identity crisis. The sinister bridge is meant to usher in a new era for Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville), but the inner lives of several characters, including Harriet’s, fall victim to its supernatural influence. Part comic allegory and part fairy tale, The Suspension Bridge takes the reader, with dark humour and occasional sympathy, into a midair world of bridges of many sorts, that don’t always hold up as well as they promise.
“Intriguing characters… the reader senses the historic tensions of the real world of 1962 just beyond the page, kept back by a levee that might not hold.”
“Please welcome a new and entertaining clerical sleuth: Sister Harriet is intelligent, determined, funny, and not a little perplexed as she investigates some very odd doings in a very odd town determined to be the very model of the very modern year of 1962–– until it all goes pear-shaped. Filled with many twists and turns, The Suspension Bridge is a charming and deliciously convoluted tale served with both dark humour and a lighthearted air.”
“An imposing under-construction bridge presents a framework for bureaucratic subterfuge and veiled mischief—both spiritual and secular. Sister Harriet navigates her way in and out of her cloistered world in unorthodox ways, uncovering—in the process—a case of civic espionage and a possible multiple-murder. Anna Dowdall’s wry sense of humour shines in this fable of life lines and inescapable missions.”
“Anna Dowdall delivers the shivers. Oh, and if you hear a corpulent slithering sound, that will be Alfred Hitchcock stirring in his grave because he didn’t live long enough to film this quality novel. Yes, it’s that good.”
“At once dark and moody and irreverently cheeky, The Suspension Bridge joins together literary mystery with municipal intrigue and a young nun’s tell-all as she faces her own internal conflicts. Dowdall infuses rich atmosphere with captivating uncertainty and characters undeniably Canadian yet redolent of some other time and place.”
Anna Dowdall
Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and, like her protagonist in The Suspension Bridge, moved back to the city of her birth twice. Again like the peripatetic Sister Harriet, she’s lived all over, currently making the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto her home. Occupationally just as restless, she’s been a reporter, a nurse’s aide, a graphic artist, a college lecturer, a planner, a union thug, a translator, a baker, a book conservator, a pilot and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Raised on fairy tales, she began by writing two young adult fantasy novels. These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award. After being told by an agent her words were too “big,” she shifted to adult fiction. Her three genre-bending literary mysteries, April on Paris Street (Guernica 2021), The Au Pair (2018) and After the Winter (2017), feature evocative settings and a preoccupation with the lives of women. A lover of prose, she once wrote a poem, which ended up on an electricity pole on Montreal’s rue de la Poésie.
