From the bestselling author of Mistakes to Run With, a heartrending tale of a mother hell-bent on saving her family after her daughter's suicide attempt—despite the destruction it might mean for herself.

When Rose’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Juliet, attempts suicide, she does everything she can to hold her family together despite the inevitable unraveling that follows. Her husband Syd thinks their daughter is fine, that she’s going through a phase, and tells Rose she’s overreacting—as do the doctors, the school principal, and even Juliet herself. But Rose knows her daughter better than anyone. Doesn’t she?

Rose and Juliet begin to drift apart and then fade into each other until they aren’t sure who’s saving whom—or if they’re saving each other. As Rose struggles to navigate this unknown territory, the family unwittingly makes decisions that suddenly send them all into an escalated tailspin toward disaster.

Capturing the tightly coiled tension of seeing someone on the edge of a bridge about to jump, Yasuko Thanh takes us on a journey into the psyche of a woman grappling to understand why her daughter would want to die, and how to protect her child when she’s chosen not to protect herself.

Haunting, emotional, and unforgettable, To the Bridge shows how a bridge is not something to leap from, but something to cross—how a mother and her daughter can find a way to connect, even when there is a river of difference raging between them.

Yasuko Nguyen Thanh is a Canadian writer and guitarist born June 30, 1971 in Victoria, British Columbia. She has lived in Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Latin America and she was named one of ten CBC Books' writers to watch in 2013.

Yasuko Thanh's profile page

“In passages of dialogue, the rhythms of speech are true-to-life; the pace is electric; the complex subject of adolescent suicide is demanding and dramatic. To the Bridge demonstrates empathy for the characters, paying serious attention to trauma yet revealing a capacity for lyricism in the midst of despair. . . . Yasuko Thanh has written a tough evocative encounter with the tremors of change.”
—The British Columbia Review

“Riveting. I love all these characters, although I didn't want to. To the Bridge is the painstaking unpacking of a mother’s heart. It asks a question, loaded with maternal baggage, that any woman with a child in crisis asks: ‘Am I a good mother?’ And the answer is a sumptuous unravelling of the ties that bind. Yasuko Thanh’s prose is unassuming, understated, then all at once leaves you gasping for breath. A tour-de-force chanelling Toni Morrison–level insight with an airtight and unpredictable plot.”
—Antonio Michael Downing, author of Saga Boy

“Sex and drugs have been outed as almost universal rites of passage. But suicide: what would you do if your child wanted to kill herself because she was too happy? This wild and sobering novel may well be the one book on parenting you will ever need.”
—Susan Musgrave, Griffin Poetry Prize-longlisted author of Exculpatory Lilies

“Yasuko Thanh has done it again! To the Bridge grabs you by the throat and pulls you under the surface of every parent’s greatest fear. From the novel’s opening line, her characters crash off the page and into the imagination—raw, riven, utterly real—in prose that still finds grace and wonder amid life’s long shadows and a narrator who aches with a mother’s unrelenting love.”
—David Leach, author of Fatal Tide and Chasing Utopia
“Yasuko Thanh’s To the Bridge is a wonderful, powerful, honest story of a family fractured by an attempted suicide. It is deep, emotional, and so raw as to feel more like a confessional than a novel. Highly recommended.”
—Mick Garris, filmmaker and screenwriter