Scaffolding

'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

'My week – my life! – has been hugely improved by this compulsive, twisting story of psychoanalysis, politics and the weirdness of inhabitation itself. Elkin writes about the wrong-headedness and right-headedness of desire with high intelligence spliced with voluble wit, and a dark clarity spliced with generosity.'

Lara Feigel