A Best Book of the Year: Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Week, The New Statesman
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Sexy, intelligent . . . biting, too. Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkins Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, nds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbora younger woman called Clmentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.

Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is nishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their rst child, though Henry isnt sure hes ready for fatherhood.

Two couples, fty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, delity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar timestimes charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of ric Rohmer, Lauren Elkins Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the diculty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people weve loved live on in us.