Award-winning author and Edinburgh-based GP Gavin Francis’s The Bridge Between Worlds is the latest in a very diverse non-fiction back catalogue, from travel writing to medical memoirs, with books on the art of physical recovery and the NHS into the bargain. It’s subtitled A Brief History of Connection and the cover picture – of the famous Forth Bridge – gives away that this is an intriguing and super-smart examination of bridges, both literally and metaphorically.
This might not sound like the most engaging or profound idea, but Francis is a thoughtful and engaging writer and he makes it work. Each chapter starts with a real physical bridge of some kind but goes off into a wide variety of themes and ideas, from geopolitics and history to psychology and literature.
Bridges often appear at natural boundaries or frontiers, and Francis plays with that idea. Like the subtitle says, this is a book that looks at ideas of connection and, given the state of the world at the moment, how we might better think of a connected world, and the empathy and conciliation that that might engender.
This might all sound heavy duty but there is a lightness of touch to Francis’s prose that is a delight to read, no doubt the reason for cover blurbs from the heavyweight likes of Bill Bryson and Alexander McCall Smith. Wonderful stuff.
Doug Johnstone is an author and journalist.
The Bridge Between Worlds by Gavin Francis is out now (Canongate, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
