Overview
Readers all across America responded with a passionate intensity to Robert James Waller’s first novel The Bridges of Madison County. Now Waller tells another haunting, intelligent, poignant story about a once-in-a-lifetime love, the kind that changes you forever.
A year after Michael Tillman met another man’s wife at a university in Cedar Bend, Iowa, he found himself heading into the strange, exotic world of south India, looking for her. Her name was Jellie Braden, and Michael Tillman wanted her, and had wanted her from the first instant he saw her. Something deep in his bones had whispered, “That one.” And Jellie Braden, in her fortieth year, had heard the voice, too.
It was attraction at first sight between this maverick, middle-aged economics professor who still rode his beloved motorcycle from his teenage years and the introspective, dark-haired wife of a new colleague. It called forth feelings that wouldn’t disappear. It forced to people to come to terms with their lives in ways they hadn’t imagined, and it led them both into the magical places only lovers know. But it also brought with it the pain of choices and loss. Jellie wasn’t a free woman. And Michael Tillman wasn’t a young man, foolish with dreams: he was a mature man dead certain of the dreams he wanted. And when Jellie Braden disappeared one day, he was ready to travel the whole world looking for her to discover the secrets she was hiding and what he had to do to make her his…