Bridge of Sighs

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls comes a magnificent, bighearted novel about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch ("Lucy") and his wife of forty years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy. Louis 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 he's had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. 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. Once a rival for Sarah's affection, Noonan leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. 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.