Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Fl neuse- Women Walk the City, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
'Scaffolding is ingenious and febrile, delving into the intimacy and implacability of those awakening connections that layer, echoing, throughout our lives - doing so in ways that feel all at once vital, playful, profoundly moving. It’s a beautifully fluid meditation on what is at stake, and who we become, when we desire.' * Sophie Mackintosh * 'I time travelled with Lauren Elkin and found myself in a Parisian apartment soaking in human stories and palpitating with new discoveries as I turned each page. What a rich, tantalising narrative defying conventions, which could only ever have been written by an author who has experienced a multiplicity of lives and the true meaning of home.' * Xiaolu Guo * 'Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly ... a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.' * Daisy Lafarge * 'Be warned: this novel will absorb you, disassemble you, and leave you strangely unwilling to put yourself back together again. Read it, reread it, then give it to your friends and teachers, your relatives and your lovers.' * Devorah Baum * 'Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a novel that's remarkable for its combination of intellectual toughness and sensual precision. This investigation into multiple forms of exposure – inhabited by an array of chords and repeats and hauntings – feels urgently contemporary.’ * Adam Thirlwell *