Markus Zusak

After Markus Zusak's award-winning 2005 novel The Book Thief became an international bestseller, his legions of readers were eager for the next book from the Australian novelist. Their patience has finally been rewarded with Bridge of Clay, the epic-scale story of an Australian family wrestling with inherited traumas and unpredictable tragedy, a clan of brothers as thick as thieves and as prone to fighting as — well, any household of young men. And when we say "epic scale" by the way, we mean it: Bridge of Clay is a book steeped in the stories of Achilles, Hector, Paris and Odysseus. When he joined us in the podcast studio, Markus Zusak talked about the challenge of writing a novel with a structure he calls "tidal."