Bridge of Sighs » (Reprint)

Known for his sly humor and his touchingly real characters, Richard Russo s novels about the perennial odd man out are notable for both their sharp turns of phrase and for their nuance. The film version of Nobody's Fool earned him a wider audience, but the Pulitzer in 2001 for Empire Falls ensured a spotlight on his work for years to come.

Six years after the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo returns with a novel that expands even further his widely heralded achievement. Louis Charles ("Lucy") Lynch has spent all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he's had plenty of reasons not to be chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an "empire" of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy and Sarah are also preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself far from anything they'd known in childhood. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in...

The Barnes & Noble Review

After a lifetime lived in the same small upstate New York town, Lou C. Lynch, a deeply cautious and conventional man, is headed for a vacation in Italy. It's an improbable leap for this most improbable hero of Bridge of Sighs, but with Richard Russo -- master of blue-collar life (and a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all) -- at the helm, even the most oddball of setups can yield riches.