Spanning continents and centuries, Bridges braids history and fiction to reveal how bridges are both feats of engineering and vessels of memory. From the Roman Pont du Gard to the Millau Viaduct, from the Drina to the Bloor Street Viaduct and Maputo–Katembe, the book follows workers, engineers, nuns, poets, truckers, and migrants whose lives converge on steel, stone, rope, and water.

Lyrical and deeply researched, it explores connection and rupture as well as power, faith, grief, love, and labour and shows how motion is emotion and how every crossing changes us. A luminous meditation on the architectures that carry us between past and future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barbara Adair is a South African writer whose work spans novels, short fiction, travel writing, book reviews and academic articles. A former human-rights attorney, she later taught at the University of the Witwatersrand and has undertaken part-time work at Wits, the Soweto Book Café and SAE College in Johannesburg, as well as in Nairobi and Lamu, Kenya.

She holds a BA (Hons.) LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand and a PhD from the University of Pretoria.

Adair’s fiction is distinguished by its engagement with place, memory, history and the unsettled lives of people moving through contested landscapes. Her debut novel, In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot (Jacana, 2005; reprinted by Modjaji Books in 2020), imagines the lives of Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangier and was shortlisted for the 2005 Sunday Times Fiction Award. END (Jacana, 2009), a Casablanca-inspired pastiche set in Johannesburg and Maputo, was shortlisted for the 2010 African Regional Commonwealth Prize. WILL, the Passenger Delaying Flight …, (Modjaji Books, 2020) follows a man travelling from Europe to Africa while weaving together stories of waiting and airport lives; it was longlisted for the 2020 NIHSS Literary Award and the 2021 Sunday Times Fiction Award. In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw (Modjaji Books, 2022), an exploration of imagined lives in the Art Deco buildings of Springs, was longlisted for the 2023 Sunday Times Fiction Award and shortlisted for the 2024 NIHSS Literary Award. Her later books extend this interest in geography, architecture and belonging: 6H00 somewhere, and many hours later somewhere else (Modaji Books, 2025), created with drawings by Mark Kannemeyer, offers an observational and disquieting road journey through Namibia, while The Art Deco Buildings of Nairobi – An African Asian Heritage (Zand Press, 2026) examines the politics and families behind the overlooked Art Deco houses of Parklands, Nairobi.