Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo (2007, Unabridged, Compact Disc)

Synopsis
In the small, economically gutted town of Thomaston, N.Y., three friends and lovers, Lou C. Lynch (nicknamed "Lucy"), Bobby Marconi, and Sarah Berg, struggle with the emotional desolation of their lives, loves, and families. Richard Russo is a master at showing how minor crimes and misunderstanding--a fight, a one-night-stand, a marriage to the wrong man--snowball into bitter tragedies.

Key Details
Author:	Richard Russo
Language:	English
Publisher:	Random House
Format:	Audio
ISBN-10:	0739318896
ISBN-13:	9780739318898

Additional Details
Narrated by:	Arthur Morey
Edition Description:	Unabridged

Size
Thickness:	2.2 in
Weight:	20 oz

Publisher's Note
After sixty years of living in the upstate New York town of Thomaston with his wife of forty years, indominable mother, and grown son, Louis Charles and his wife Sarah prepare for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy to visit his childhood friend, an artist who had fled his hometown many years earlier, where he hopes to come to terms with the secrets of small-town life and their individual fates. Simultaneous.

After sixty years of living in the upstate New York town of Thomaston, Louis Charles and his wife of forty years, Sarah, prepare for a trip to Italy to visit Louis' childhood friend, an artist who had fled his hometown many years earlier.

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 “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.

Industry Reviews
"Rich, comforting, and absorbing--utterly irresistible." (starred review)
(09/15/2007)

"BRIDGE OF SIGHS, [Richard] Russo's splendid chronicle of life in the hollowed-out town of Thormaston, N.Y...is large-hearted, vividly populated and filled with life from America's recent, still vanishing past."
(08/13/2007)

"[Richard Russo] is a sentimental, humorous, ruminative, occasionally satirical, and extremely unhurried writer....His drama is modestly scaled, but his anthill is convincingly alive with ants."
(10/15/2007)

"No novelist writes better about struggling small towns and the working class than Richard Russo, whose last novel, EMPIRE FALLS, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. BRIDGE OF SIGHS explores both familiar and new territory. It's his most ambitious and best work."
(09/24/2007)

"It is a novel of great warmth, charm and intimacy, but not one of earth-shattering revelations....Some of this book's most memorable moments take the form of sharp, funny storytelling."
(09/24/2007)

"BRIDGE OF SIGHS, the new novel by Richard Russo, might be my favorite Russo novel yet....It's so nice to be back in his company after six years that I haven't fully emerged from the gratitude that overtook me when I picked up the book....[It] is a rich, warm American novel full of brains and soul."
(09/23/2007)