The Bridge of Beyond

"It is like a fable in the form of a ballad, which is to say it is poetical but not always clear. It's langorous sense of ease, dangerously close to delusion, gives scope to Simone Schwarz-Bart's considerable gift for describing the trees and flowers of her native island." --Paul Theroux, The New York Times

"In a literary field saturated with messianic heroes, be they poetic or proletarian, The Bridge of Beyond plunges us into a fabulous story of women, the chronicle of a mythical line of matrons: the Lougandors. Yet something would be lacking if we saw it merely as, for example, a rewriting of [Jacques Romain's] Masters of the Dew, where a family of women are playing their version of Manuel. In comparison with these pre-texts, Simone Schwarz-Bart innovates. She innovates by metamorphosing the Creole oral tradition." --Maryse Condé

"Her stories seem to gleam with the polish of re-telling and are a distillation of passion and experience in which every trace of whimsicality and affectation have been squeezed out by the knowledge of real suffering. The virtues are, of course, not [the character] Toussine's but the author's, but so natural is this that it is easy to forget that it is a work of fiction; it is a very fine achievement." --The Irish Times

"The book's gift of life is so generous, and its imagery so scintillant...that we believe every word." --John Updike, The New Yorker

"There's magic, madness, glory, tenderness, above all abundant hope." --Financial Times

"The language...is as luxuriant as the foliage of the Antilles." --The Times (London)