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#679 of 8,085 books · #127 in Historical Fiction

Won the National Book Award for Fiction (1968).

The Eighth Day won the National Book Award. In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim's wife and children. At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic.

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Publisher
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ISBN-13
9780060088910
Topics
Family and fateMurder and injusticeAmerican frontier life

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