This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Anne Enright read her story,

The Bridge Stood Fast, from the August 4th, 2025 issue of the magazine. Enright has published

11 books of fiction, including the story collection Yesterday's Weather and the novels The

Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize, actress and The Wren the Wren.

Now here's Anne Enright.

The Bridge stood fast.

She was a busy little item.

There was a doll to be fixed up and chastised with a hairbrush that was twice its length,

also a colouring book and a packet of markers, which she took out of the soft plastic sleeve and spilled all down herself so she was in the footwell and up again 17 times

between the Walkins Town roundabout and Newlands Cross.

Iver waited for her to settle,

but she was too excited to settle. And he finally said, wiggle in there into the back and be quiet. She looked over at him. Hop in, go on. It was her first time sitting in the front seat.

Or put the things back there, just throw them in and be quiet.

The child clambered arse about face, then turned back and sat still for two seconds before lurching forward.

She hung there dangling from the seatbelt and making fussed old lady noises.

Ah! There was a single marker rolling about it. seatbelt and making fussed old lady noises.

There was a single marker rolling about the footwell.

Get up, he said, leave it, leave it, realising as he saw her there that the floor of a car was surprisingly close to the road.

He remembered once getting a lift from a Connemara man who used his car on the beach

and its floor was all rotted out by the salt.

...