An epic story of faith, obsession and love.
In 1923 the planned Sydney Harbour Bridge represents an impossible ideal - to span the great waters of the harbour and take a war-scarred nation into a dazzling new future. Nobody is more enthusiastic than Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage of Lavender Bay, whose imagination is seized by the scale of this thoroughly modern vision.
Ralph is a grand dreamer with all-too-human failings and in the Bridge, which he can see under construction from his Rectory verandah, he finds an obsession to last a lifetime. Sermons become paeans to the creative will of God - and the beauty of girders and pylons - and his parish papers wax lyrical about rivets and granite. But as he urges his long-suffering wife Stella, his children, his parishioners and the phlegmatic housekeeper Mrs Pessey to dream as big as he does, Ralph fails to notice those left behind by the bridge: the dispossessed families whose houses are destroyed in its path and, as the Great Depression wears on, the hungry parishioners for whom the bridge is a bitter reminder of a promised prosperity that never comes. As Ralph invests everything in his obsession, the great arch he so loves and admires threatens to become the agent of his demise.
Inspired by true people and events, and as open and colossal as the bridge itself, Vicki Hastrich's deeply moving novel links two centuries, two world wars and two generations as Ralph journeys from birth to death. By turns wickedly funny and breathtakingly poetic, this is the story of an ordinary man, and an ordinary life, made grand.
