Bridge of Sighs

Richard Russo’s novel is set in Thomaston, a declining upstate New York mill town, and narrated largely by Lou ‘Lucy’ Lynch, a contented shopkeeper approaching sixty. As Lou writes his life story, the book weaves together his marriage, his father’s optimism, class and race in the town, and his boyhood friend Bobby, who fled to become a famous painter in Italy. It is a rich, humane portrait of a place and its people.