There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.
And so begins a story that you will never forget...
The Bridges of Madison County is the story of Robert Kincaid, a world-class photographer, and Francesca Johnson, an Iowa farm wife. Kincaid, fifty-two, is a photographer for National Geographic. A strange, almost mystical traveler of Asian deserts, distant rivers, and ancient cities, he is a man who feels out of harmony with time. Francesca Johnson, forty-five and once a young war bride from Italy, lives in the hills of south Iowa with flickering memories of her girlhood dreams. Each of them is content, yet when Robert Kincaid drives through the heat and dust of an Iowa summer and turns into her farm lane looking for directions, their illusions fall away, and they are joined in an experience that will haunt them forever.
As the photographer Kincaid uses light to reveal not objects, but rather his own kind of truth, what occurs by the old bridges of Madison County becomes a prism transforming the ordinary emotions we think we understand into something rare and brilliant. The result is a passionate, deeply moving experience in lyrical prose, an achievement that puts Robert James Waller in the forefront of this country's new fiction writers.
Editorial Review(s)
"Quietly powerful and thoroughly credible, Waller's first novel (he previously wrote two books of essays) describes the profound love between a photographer and an Iowa farmer's wife who, together for only four days, never lose their feelings for each other. In August 1965, 52-year-old divorce Robert Kincaid packs his pickup truck and travels to Iowa's Madison County, the location of seven covered bridges he is to photograph for National Geographic . There, he asks directions of Francesca Johnson, alone at home while her husband and two children visit the Illinois State Fair. Initially, neither Robert nor Francesca expects their random encounter to lead to seduction, yet their mutual desire is undeniable. Waller tells their story as though it were nonfiction, claiming to have heard about Francesca from her children after her death, read her journals, seen Robert's relics of those four days and interviewed a jazz musician who knew the photographer. Scenes between the lovers are movingly evoked and moments with Francesca, who celebrates her birthday 22 years later by reflecting on her brief time with Robert, are particularly poignant. An erotic, bittersweet tale of lingering memories and forsaken possibilities." --Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Robert James Waller lived on a remote ranch in the high-desert mountains of Texas, where he pursued his interests in writing, photography, music, economics, and mathematics. He was the New York Times bestselling author of The Bridges of Madison County, which was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and also as a successful Broadway musical, and Thousand Country Roads. He died in his home at age 77.
