Cities as structures of feeling, relationships as temporary architectures, and women’s lives shaped by the touch of both everything, and nothing.

Scaffolding is Lauren Elkin’s first novel, written out of the same intellectual terrain as her criticism. Set between London and New York, the book traces the intimate negotiations of love, ambition, and belonging without resolving them into uplift or moral clarity.

Elkin’s narrative is concerned with how lives are held up—provisionally—by work, by partners, by places that are never quite finished. The novel sits comfortably alongside contemporary transatlantic fiction that circles precarity and attachment as material conditions. 

Edition note: Signed copy. Independent bookshop exclusive edition. First edition hardback.