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Bridge of Sighs

By Richard Russo

(16)

| Hardcover | 9780375414954

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Book Description

Six years after the best-selling, 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 tContinue

Six years after the best-selling, 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 “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing.

Bridge of Sighs is classic Russo, coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family, yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose motivations and experiences—often contrary, sometimes not—prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions. 

Critics

  • A Word About Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs Share

    The coincidence of starting to read Jonathan Franzen's latest blockbuster Freedom immediately upon having finished a re-reading of Richard Russo's 2007 Bridge of Sighs focused my attention on what seemed to me to be a surprising number of similaritie ... (read full critics)

    blogcritics published on Sat, 11 Jun 2011

  • Town Without Pity

    Someone — it’s been attributed to everyone from Dostoyevsky to John Gardner — once said there are only two possible stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. To these Richard Russo has added a third: schlub stays put. In a time k ... (read full critics)

    nytimes published on Sat, 18 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  • The characters were real to me. At least I was able to identify them with real people I know. Not in the same situations but the personalities.

    The ending was a little off for me and some what anti-climatic. Too nicely wrapped up.

    This was for March's book club meeting.

    Is this helpful?

    Vivianrinsc said on Mar 31, 2009 | Add your feedback

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ISBN Edition List Sale Seller
9780375414954 Hardcover $26.95 $23.04 bn.com
-- $11.99 ebooks.com
$26.95 $23.88 The Book Depository
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