The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day is a novel by the American writer Thornton Wilder, published in 1967. It is set in a mining town in southern Illinois, and its plot turns on a murder and on what happens afterwards.

John Barrington Ashley is accused of shooting his neighbour Breckenridge Lansing while the men of the two families are practising with their rifles on a weekend visit. The town suspects that Ashley and Lansing's wife Eustacia were having an affair, and Ashley is convicted and sentenced to death.

Days before the execution he is rescued by mysterious masked men and escapes to Chile, where he lives under the name James Tolland and finds work in the copper mining industry. The novel then follows the family he has left behind: his wife and children have no income, so they run a boarding house to keep going, and his son Roger and his daughter Lily both take false names and make lives for themselves in Chicago and then New York.

Wilder wrote the book over twenty months while living alone in Douglas, Arizona. It won the National Book Award in 1968.