About Grace Bridges
Grace Bridges is a dreamer whose muse blows best when it's fresh from the sea. A graduate of the University of Auckland, she translates German and edits novels for a living, and writes from her hilltop in New Zealand although faraway places call to her just as often. Her short works of fiction and nonfiction are found in multiple international anthologies and literary journals, and she continues to work on novels in The Vortex of Éire series. She is inordinately happy that her hair has started going silver.
BIBLIOPHILE MUSINGS:
The narrative starts out with alternating plotlines several decades apart for what seem to be two different sets of characters. Are things truly as they appear or will revelations come that indicate coincidence is more than just happenstance? Bridges’ writing quickly drew me into the various settings of Bangor, Regensburg, New Zealand and various other sites around the world, both familiar and new to me that were all transported to various times both contemporary and future. Her characters also made a nearly instant connection through vivid descriptions of personalities and how they dealt with situations and challenges they faced throughout the story. Bridges theorizes a fictional but probable near future in her narrative and places her characters in a variety of challenges that result from that resulting world. I was startled into wondering whether I would be able to handle life in such a future myself and how I would face similar challenging decisions if my world as I knew it was threatened in ways I never expected. Bridges deftly pulls readers, myself included, into a post-apocalyptic narrative that is packed with action, drama and suspense.
