The Observer Book Club with Erica Wagner

Invited experts

Erica Wagner

Consulting Editor

Tom Gatti

Literary Editor

Erica Wagner

Consulting Editor

Tom Gatti

Literary Editor

Join the Observer Book Club for an evening with Erica Wagner, discussing her acclaimed new novel Wash, in conversation with Tom Gatti.

At the centre of Wash is Washington Roebling, the man who oversaw the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge - but Wagner’s novel is less a historical reconstruction than an intimate act of imagination. Moving through memory rather than chronology, it traces a life shaped by a brutal father, war, illness and a great love, asking what it means to spend your life fulfilling a dream that was never entirely your own.

Never more poignantly told, Wash is a richly layered portrait of ambition, marriage and inheritance, and of the emotional cost behind one of the modern world’s great engineering feats.

Wagner will discuss the decades-long fascination that led her to Roebling’s story, the relationship between fact and fiction, and how the lives we live are shaped as much by longing as by history.