Bridge to Bat City

Product Information

A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Set for publication in April 2024, the book is described as a “mostly true tall tale” about a recently orphaned young girl named Opal B Flats, who forms an unexpected friendship with a music-loving colony of bats and helps them find a new home against all odds. If Opal and the bats can fit in anywhere, it’s the nearby city of Austin, home to their favorite music and a host of wonderfully eccentric characters. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

But just as the farm is starting to feel like home, the bats’ cave is destroyed by a big mining company with its sights set on the farmland next.With his signature deep dives into nerdy pop culture futures, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is one of Austin's biggest-selling authors. This is an enchanting tale that weaves together fact and fiction set against the incredible backdrop of 1980s Austin, filled with a vibrant cast of characters, rich music history, activism and environmentalism, and bats! His first novel, Ready Player One, was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, appeared on numerous “best of the year” lists, and is set to be adapted into a motion picture by Warner Bros. Inspiration for the novel stemmed from Cline’s longtime residency in Austin, TX, which is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games.

Cline’s Ready Player One is a dystopian, sci-fi novel about Wade Watts, a teenager in the year 2044. But with people afraid of the bats and determined to get rid of them, it’ll take a whole lot of courage to prove that this is where the bats—and Opal—belong. Bridge to Bat City is the type of book I loved to read as a child; it’s a book about being an outsider—a weirdo, even!Cline is best known for his debut novel Ready Player One — a beloved work of science fiction that follows 18-year-old Wade Watts as he looks to claim the fortune of a late video game creator by completing a quest to discover an Easter egg hidden within one of his virtual reality worlds.