The Iron Bridge

In a bold, brilliant collection of stories, Dora Award-winning playwright Anton Piatigorsky delivers a superbly inspired inquiry into the early lives of the 20th century&146s most notorious tyrants. In The Iron Bridge, he is unafraid to push at the boundaries of the unexpected as he breathes fictionalized life into the adolescents who would grow up to become the most brutal dictators the world has ever known. We discover a teenaged Mao Tse-Tung refusing an arranged marriage; Idi Amin cooking for the British Army; Stalin living in a seminary; and a melodramatic young Adolf Hitler dreaming of vast architectural achievements. Piatigorsky dazzlingly explores moments that are nothing more than vague incidents in the biographies of these men, expanding mere footnotes into entire realities as he ingeniously fills the gaps of the historical record. The Iron Bridge, completely imagined yet captivatingly real, captures those crucial instants in time that may well have helped to deliver some of the most infamous leaders in history.

“The strength of The Iron Bridge: the idea is not to explain, but to narrate. These are good stories — well-written, interesting, and engaging. The premise is not a gimmick, so much as a jumping-off point for the fiction. The Iron Bridge is an intriguing idea, well executed.” — Heather Cromarty, Quill & Quire

“Clever and convincing . . . Toronto-based author Anton Piatigorsky — a writer of plays, librettos and fiction — manages to present this sextet of future tyrants in fiction as deeply flawed people . . . The stories, which all seem plausible, provide us with some real insight into the protagonists’ manipulative minds, thus providing perspective into their adult actions as murderous psychopaths.” — Martin Zeilig, Winnipeg Free Press