Books by Erica Wagner

A New Statesman Book of the Year for 2017His father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was Washington Roebling who built this iconic feat of human engineering after his father's tragic death. It has stood for more than 130 years and is now as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Yet, as recognisable as the bridge is, its builder is too often forgotten. The Chief Engineer is a brilliant examination of the life of one of America's most distinguished engineers. Roebling's experience as an engineer building bridges in the Union Army during the civil War has never before been documented, and played a central role in the bridge that links Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge took fourteen dramatic years to complete, and the personal story that lay behind that construction is told here for the first time. The Chief Engineer is an engaging portrait of a brilliant and driven man, and of the era in which he lived. Meticulously researched, and written with revealing archival material only recently uncovered, including Washington Roebling's own memoir that was previously thought to be lost to history, in The Chief Engineer Erica Wagner relates the fascinating history of the bridge and its maker.

Janet grew up with her father; her mother, she was always told, died when she was three. But now, she unexpectedly inherits a house from her mother, who in fact lived long into Janet's adulthood in an old stone cottage at the sea's edge. Tom was raised by his mother, travelling from one place to another, his only stability the stories she told him - of shapeshifters, danger, impossible love. Now he hides away in an old stone cottage at the sea's edge, waiting for a woman he knows will come. Here is a world where lives and stories become so interwoven that in the end, all distinctions are lost. Written in searing and original prose, Seizure is an intense love story between two people terrified and trapped by the past.

Erica Wagner provides a comprehensive guide to the poems that must constitute one of the most extraordinary and powerful volumes published in the last century. When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim. Few suspected that Ted Hughes had been at work, for a quarter of a century, on a cycle of poems addressed almost entirely to his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner offers a commentary on the poems, pointing the reader towards the events that shaped them, and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work.