Discuss the nature of love and marriage as described in the novel. What made Jake so irresistible to Laura? What made Dr. Christopherson’s wife choose another man? Was Laura’s appeal strictly physical when she first moved to town? What is the riskiest romantic decision you have made? The novel uses the dual-timeline device, which I think can be very effective in the right hands, though it is less often successful than one might think. These are the right hands–Lawson knows what she is doing, and she sprinkles the present and the past together like she is following an age-old recipe. Ian, the son of Struan's physician, asks Arthur for a summer job because he is smitten with Laura, Arthur's beautiful wife. Ian turns out to be a good worker and a special relationship develops between Ian and the Dunn family. Arthur looked at Jake and saw that he was staring at the knife. His expression was one of surprise, and this was something that Arthur wondered about later too. Was Jake surprised because he had never considered the possibility that he might be a less than perfect shot? Did he have that much confidence in himself, that little self-doubt?

Finally, after reading several books that have come up a little short, I’ve found an author that really takes me somewhere new, even for just a short time.Interwoven with the story of the Dunn family is that of Ian Christopherson, the son of the town doctor who as a teen works weekends and summers on the farm of the adult Arthur. Ian has a huge crush on Arthur's wife and describes being in her presence: My favorite thing about this book was how it creeped up on the climax. The whole thing was written with such a calm, serene feel that when something does actually happen, it doesn't seem unbelievable. It seems like the whole book was flowing up to this point, like a river that (not surprisingly) ends up at the ocean. I liked how the whole book was subtile, but still really powerful. He saw that it was impossible to be sure of anything, where Jake was concerned. He could never know what Jake was thinking or intending, never know his motives, never understand the first thing about him”.

Foundation: The foundation (or base) of a bridge is the element that connects the structure to the earth and transfers loads from it to the ground below. Thus we are introduced to 8 or 9 year old Jake Dunn. Jake is the second of two sons born to the Dunns in 1920's rural northern Ontario. He is completely unlike the other males of his family (his father and his older brother Arthur) who are big, physical, hardworking and who love farming. So Jake looks to garner attention in other ways. When my editor was approached by the publisher with this book she knew that I was something that I would read. I had previously read, reviewed and adored his book The Orphan Keeper. Strange, the way the mind works. The way it protects itself from things that cannot face. Grief, for instance. Or regret. Guilt. It finds something else, anything, to draw between it and what cannot be looked at”. Flood arch: A flood arch is a small, secondary arch bridge that sits next to a main bridge. It provides additional capacity to handle flood water. The area beneath a flood arch is typically dry or handles a limited amount of water. Flood arches are frequently added after the main bridge has been flooded.The Other Side of the Bridge was deservedly longlisted for the Man Booker prize. It is Mary Lawson's second novel: her first, Crow Lake, was memorable for its spare, effective style and its powerful storytelling. This new book revisits the same territory in northern Ontario - the lake features, and the town doctor becomes a central figure - and is, if anything, even more arresting. She has a remarkable gift for conjuring up place and people in a handful of words, a few lines of dialogue. Struan is a remote town set amid wilderness and farming land, with a sawmill, "a sorry bunch of stores lined up along a dusty main street", the Hudson's Bay Company, Post Office, bank, restaurant, bar, hotel. The population is involved in farming or employed at the sawmill and the local mine. There is also the Ojibway reserve, with its own self-contained community.

How were you affected by the novel’s prologue? What did you discover about Arthur and Jake in this scene? How did your perceptions of the brothers change throughout the book? Katie Connelly has lived in San Francisco all her life. Her late father made his career on the Golden Gate Bridge, and the many stories of how he saved jumpers still haunt her. And now her job assignment is to write about the history of the bridge—a history that includes a secret journal about a promise ring and a love story that may be the answer to her unresolved sorrow.

She is a marvelously skilled writer, painting the landscape with as much care as she does the people who inhabit it, and telling us something about those people by measuring their reactions to nature itself. Bridges have gotten much more complicated since then. That’s why we’ve compiled this glossary of 20 of the most common structural components used on bridges. Carl Luntz: Arthur's best friend. Has a collection of antlers. Goes to fight in the war and dies along with his brothers.