Pick Cantrell is a successful newspaper cartoonist whose career has hit the skids.  Fired from his job in New York, he returns with his wife and son to Eno, North Carolina, where he confronts the ghosts of his past in the form of the family matriarch and his boyhood nemesis, Mama Lucy.

What follows is an extraordinary story within a story, as Pick uncovers startling  truths about himself and the role his grandmother played in the crippling General Textile Strike of 1934.  A novel about family, love, and forgiveness, The Bridge explores how much we ever really know about others, and most importantly, about ourselves.

In addition to his Pulitzer prize-winning work as a political cartoonist and creator of the comic strip "Kudzu,"  Doug Marlette has written the "Ethics" column in Esquire magazine.  He lives in North Carolina with his wife and son.



Advance Praise for Doug Marlette's
THE BRIDGE


Doug Marlette's The Bridge is the finest  first novel out of North Carolina since the publication of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.

                                                                                       --Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

"The Bridge is a remarkable book . . . A novelist is born."
                                                                            -- Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Peachtree Road

"Doug Marlette's natural talent for delightful humor glimmers in The Bridge.  But he also leaves you holding your heart with both hands."
                                                                            -- Rick Bragg, author of All Over But The Shoutin'

"Doug Marlette takes us deep into the heart of America, and deeper into the American heart -- this is a story with great emotional resonance, about going home and forgiving and paying homage.  His past and present not only lives and breathes, it lingers and it haunts your soul."

                                                                                             --Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors

"Doug Marlette is a gifted storyteller and The Bridge is a first-rate novel.  In the tradition of James Agee he shines a light on an invisible America, giving voice to a voiceless people, and eloquent testimony to a buried history.  But like other novelists who started out as cartoonists -- John Updike, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Conner come to mind -- he entertains so thoroughly while doing so that his moral and human truths slip up on us without our ever noticing."
                                                                                       --Robert Coles, author of Children of Crisis

"Revelatory.  Enthralling."

                                                                             --Studs Turkel, author of Working                                       

"The Bridge is about massive, indomitable human spirit...Marlette writes with such uncommon, extraordinary grace {and} humor and with such  bursts of necessary force that I was left in perfect wonder at the novel's close"

                                                                                              --Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster