Erica Wagner’s Wash tells the story of a boy Washington Roebling growing up in Pennsylvania under the eye of a brutal but brilliant father. He is a young man at college, enduring the choices that have been made for him and finding brightness and beauty all the same. He is a soldier in a dreadful war who- despite that awful conflict- finds an extraordinary woman who was the love of his life, and her tale inextricably twines with is. He is an engineer who builds one of the great wonders of the modern world. His life holds the possible and the impossible, what could be grasped and what could only be longed for. History holds one truth. Here is another.

Forged in a brutal age, duty-bound to execute his domineering fathers’ vision of the life he must live, he joins forces with his brilliant wife Emily to overcome myriad obstacles to fulfilling  his obligation, Chief among them his own yearning to shed the burden of achieving a dream that was never his own.

Wash is a book of growth, yearning, about the price of achievement, about the road not taken. Beads on the necklace of a life are strung together to create a composite portrait not only of Washington but of those who loved him. Emily of course, but Max too – a young man whose spirit will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Wagner combines duty and desire, love and obligation, intersect and contradict each other, with subtle narrative and powerful, vivid prose offering an invitation to enter a complex world, so that readers may see their own histories, their own possibilities, mirrored in this compelling story.  

Wash is story built from many intricately linked elements as the iconic Brooklyn Bridge that its hero’s lasting legacy. In Wash, our  in history, a eponymous hero, brings a world full of marvellous visions, terrible conflict, heroic labours, unbearable loss and deep love to indelible life.

Wash By Erica Wagner, Salt £10.99, 272 pages.