Bridge of Sighs: Oprahs Book Club (Vintage Contemporaries)

OPRAHS BOOK CLUB PICK NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the beloved Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Empire Falls comes a magnificent, bighearted novel (The Boston Globe) about smalltown America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (Lucy) and his wife of forty years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy.ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Christian Science MonitorLouis Charles Lynch is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in 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 hes had plenty of reasons not to bechief 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 onceinalifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself. Once a rival for Sarahs affection, Noonan leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the history hes writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son whod fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing.