Juno Books Presents...
Juno Books are thrilled to host Lauren Elkin in conversation with Helen Mort, discussing her new novel 'Scaffolding' on Tuesday 9th of July at 19.00 - everyone welcome!
It is the story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.
In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective calledles colleuses.
Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…
Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.
A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Flâneuse: 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 She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables.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.
Helen Mort is an award winning author of three poetry collections, Division Street (2013), No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022), which was nominated for the Forward Prize. Helen has written a novel, Black Car Burning (2019), a short story collection, Exire (2019) and non-fiction, A Line Above the Sky (2022), and most recently, Ethel (2024), a biography of countryside pioneer Ethel Haythornthwaite. Helen lives in Sheffield.
Join Us!
- This event will take place at The Mowbray, Kelham Island.
- You are welcome to arrive from 7pm to grab a drink from the bar with the event starting at 7:15pm.
- Secure your seat via Juno's Website
