Scaffolding

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Guardian

“Scaffolding is ingenious and febrile, delving into the intimacy and implacability of those awakening connections that layer, echoing, throughout our lives—doing so in ways that feel all at once vital, playful, profoundly moving. It’s a beautifully fluid meditation on what is at stake, and who we become, when we desire.” —Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread

“Atmospheric and evocative . . . Elegant and poised.” —Alex Preston, The Guardian

“Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a novel that’s remarkable for its combination of intellectual toughness and sensual precision. This investigation into multiple forms of exposure—inhabited by an array of chords and repeats and hauntings—feels urgently contemporary.” —Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future

“Be warned: this novel will absorb you, disassemble you, and leave you strangely unwilling to put yourself back together again. Read it, reread it, then give it to your friends and teachers, your relatives, and your lovers.” —Devorah Baum, author of On Marriage

“My life has been hugely improved by this compulsive, twisting story of psychoanalysis, politics, and the weirdness of inhabitation.” —Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman

“Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly: I read it with the voyeuristic fervor of stalking a new crush, or doomscrolling an ex. It’s also a tale of the unconscious as ultimate homewrecker, and is unafraid to upend the temporary structures of monogamy and domesticity, scrambling their contents, seeing how the pieces land. Elkin’s novel is a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and it fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Life Without Air