The Risk Pool

The Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist's cautionary tale of failed fathers and the sons who idolise them.

If Russo's books possessed only their big-hearted, endlessly revisitable characters, that would be enough. That they also possess belting story lines about broken families, comically recalcitrant pensioners, small-town decay and the indelibility of roots sometimes seems like an act of unparalleled literary generosity

Perhaps if it was pointed out that here was a US writer who stood somewhere between Anne Tyler at her darkest and Russell Banks, with an occasional hint of Richard Ford at his least bleak, perhaps Russo would become as widely read as he deserves to be

No one writing today catches the detail of life with such stunning accuracy

Charms readers with its humour and refreshes with it's vast, Dickensian cast of characters

Russo proves himself a master at evoking the sights, feelings and smells of a town... Superbly original and maliciously funny

Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his fifth novel, Empire Falls. He is also the author of Mohawk, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic, as well as a collection of stories, The Whore’s Child. His original screenplay is the basis for Rowan Atkinson’s film Keeping Mum. He lives with his wife in Maine and in Boston.

The Risk Pool is a thirty-year journey through the lives of Sam Hall, a small-town gambling hellraiser, and his watchful, introspective son Ned. When Ned's mother Jenny suffers a breakdown and retreats from her husband's carelessness into a dream world, Ned becomes part of his father's seedy nocturnal world, touring the town's bars and pool halls, struggling to win Sam's affections while avoiding his sins.

Empire Falls

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is a huge-hearted and wonderful novel by a master storyteller.

I loved Richard Russo's Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls, a moving, brilliantly imagined and intensely satisfying novel about the slow death of a small town: Russo's characters are as loveable and as exasperating as family

His natural grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion for his characters

Like Anne Tyler, Russo is interested in how people rub along; in kindness and responsibility; in cutting slack without being asked. In the Empire Grill he has created a place so involving that not only can you see and smell it, but you start to feel a bit left out of the gin rummy. Russo makes an enormous job of story-telling look effortless. He is, in all the best senses of the word, a natural

Richard Russo can write like Edith Wharton leavened with a touch of David Lodge

Russo's command of his story is unerring... He satisfies every expectation without lapsing into predictability, and the last section of the book explodes with surprises...One of the best novelists around

Another fine performance... This is a big novel with a full canvas of human passions. Russo, a humane and traditional teller of truths, sustains his story and his readers

Russo writes with a warm, vibrant humanity

The world of Empire Falls is at least distantly related to those of John Cheever's Wapshot novels... an unpretentious master of fictional technique whose deeper wisdom expresses itself in the distinctive fallibility, decency, humor, and grace of the indisputably, irresistibly real people he puts on the page

Russo's inimitable blend of Eudora Welty, Anne Tyler and Booth Tarkington, removed to declining New England and graced with surprises all his own, makes for terrific reading, fast, funny and illuminating

Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his fifth novel, Empire Falls. He is also the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic, as well as a collection of stories, The Whore’s Child; and a memoir, On Helwig Street. His original screenplay is the basis for Rowan Atkinson’s film Keeping Mum. He lives with his wife in Maine.

Empire Falls, Maine: once a thriving hub of industry, this small town nestles in a bend of the vast and winding Knox River, and has always been the empire of the wealthy Whiting family. Now the last Mrs Whiting presides like a black widow spider over its declining fortunes. She harbours a grudge against her employee Miles Groby, who runs the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, but hopes one day to own it himself. Miles, gentle and hopeless, has other problems: his wife has run off with his worst customer, he frets about his adored teenage daughter, and his drunken father sponges off everyone. 
 
As the novel builds to a shocking climax, Russo constantly surprises with characters who will disarm you, a plot with as many twists and falls as the Knox River itself, and an ending that will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

That Old Cape Magic

A funny, bittersweet novel about two weddings and a divorce, parents, family myth and memory, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls.

The remarkable thing about this novel is its resemblance to real life. Russo creates a family that is utterly recognisable and unique... superb

Russo meditates on memory, ageing, inheritance, marriage, desire and the meaning of happiness... Written with humour and assurance

Russo brings a familiar story to life with wit, elegance, deftness and empathy

A novel for people who are terrified of becoming their parents... A dyspeptic romantic comedy... [And] an utterly charming novel. If you always cry at weddings, you'll cry at this - and laugh, too

Russo has a knack for capturing the most intimate details in the lives of ordinary people

Nobody tops Russo for nailing the self-aggrandising sourness of a certain class of American intelligentsia. Hollywood agents should be on standby

Russo's well-scripted story of mid-life crisis breezily captures the moment when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see it coming

Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his fifth novel, Empire Falls. He is also the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man and Bridge of Sighs, as well as a collection of stories, The Whore’s Child and the memoir, On Helwig Street. His original screenplay is the basis for Rowan Atkinson’s film Keeping Mum. He lives with his wife in Maine.

Jack and Joy Griffin are back on Cape Cod - where they spent their hope-filled honeymoon - for a wedding. Cracks are begining to show in Jack's peaceful family life and thirty-four year marriage. He's driving round with his father's ashes in an urn in the boot of his car, haunted by memories of bittersweet family holidays spent at the Cape, while his acerbic mother is very much alive and always on his mobile. He's spent a lifetime trying to be happier than his parents, but has he succeeded? 
 
A year later, at a second wedding, Jack has a second urn in the car, and his life is starting to unravel.

The Whore's Child

'He is brilliant...one of the more beguiling chroniclers of his times' - The Times

A master at examining subtly, from a different angle each time, the tensions that arise in long-term relationships

Russo here confirms that he is equally skilled at shorter fiction that engagingly and shrewdly achieves through subtle humour exactly what it sets out to do

Russo has more than a dash of style and an almost infallible technique

This volume is the work of a consummate storyteller...his writing displays a warmth of wit and humour, along with an ability to inject drama into a narrative

Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his fifth novel, Empire Falls. He is also the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic. His original screenplay is the basis for Rowan Atkinson’s film Keeping Mum. He lives with his wife in Maine.

In this entrancing first collection of stories, a master storyteller focuses on a fresh and fascinating range of human behaviour, revealing himself as an even more versatile and accomplished writer than his acclaimed novels have shown. 
 
As with all Russo's characters, we warm to these newcomers almost in spite of themselves. In the title story, a septuagenarian nun resolutely invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga; a seasoned Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a 25-year-old flame he never knew he'd harboured; a precious fifth-grader puzzles over life, love and baseball as he watches his parents' marriage dissolve; another child is forced into a harrowing cross-country escape; and an elderly couple rediscover the power - and misery - of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a hurricane-swept resort island.

Mohawk

'Immensely readable and sympathetic' New York Times 
 
Author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls

Russo's natural grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion for his characters. Mohawk is lively reading; it is a painful story, yet it is told with great mischief - and the triumphs and the tragedies of the characters are enhanced as victories and defeats always are, by wit

Russo writes with sensitivity and insight

Immensely readable and sympathetic... Mr Russo has an instinctive gift for capturing the rhythms of small-time life

Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his fifth novel, Empire Falls. He is also the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic, as well as a collection of stories, The Whore’s Child. His original screenplay is the basis for Rowan Atkinson’s film Keeping Mum. He lives with his wife in Maine and in Boston.

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his schoolwork - because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be smart. 
 
Mohawk chronicles over a dozen lives in a decaying leather town in upstate New York. It is a picture of life which is true for the whole world, and once viewed, will never be forgotten.

Straight Man

A 'funny and tender' (Daily Telegraph) novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls

After a while you begin to wish you lived in Richard Russo's world

The author has never been funnier. It is a testament to Russo's skill and originality that Straight Man often seems as fresh as if it were the first of its sort

Sentence by sentence Richard Russo shows that his is an eminently accomplished comic talent

Hank Devereaux, a fifty-year-old, one-time novelist now serving as temporary chair of the English department, has more than a mid-life crisis to contend with when he learns that he must cull 20 per cent of his department to meet budget. Half in love with three women, unable to understand his younger daughter or come to terms with his father, he has a dangerous philosophy that life, and academic life, could be simpler, but he fails to see the larger consequences of his own actions or of the small-world politics that ebb and flow around him, as his colleagues jostle for position and marriages fall apart and regroup. The despair of his wife, and the scourge of the campus geese, he is a man at odds with himself and caught somewhere between cause and effect.

Richard Russo

An absorbing memoir of a town, a family, and an artist – one in which only the artist has reached his potential. Sharply observed, emotionally true and metaphorically rich

I loved this very affectionate and haunting portrayal of Russo’s mother and the glove-making world gone by. The man as a boy watching his own mother’s helpless and scattered journey through her illness, describing in touching detail what the boy knew but only the man can say. It reminds me of the power that a personal story can have

A beautifully executed book easeful and lucid in tone but spiked with a few telling moments of observation, humour and violence

On Helwig Street is an excellent addition to the burgeoning genre of memoirs dealing on the complexities of the maternal bond. There is a fine line between mothering and smothering, a distinction Russo explores masterfully in this enjoyable and thoughtful book

A memoir

‘“Whoever said beggars can’t be choosers,” my grandfather would remark when she was out of earshot, “never met your mother.”’ 
 
Jean Russo was a single mother in the 1950s, badly paid and living with her only son, Richard, in the upstairs apartment of her parents’ home on Helwig Street in Gloversville, New York. 
 
When Richard left for University, Jean saw her chance to escape a dead-end town in search of a better life elsewhere. So began a series of ill-conceived adventures, as ambitious son and restless mother strove to find somewhere to belong. 
 
Hilarious and heartbreaking, a story of growing up and of growing old, of becoming a man whilst remaining a son, of thinking that the grass is greener somewhere else, but knowing that going home is inevitable: On Helwig Street is a poignant tribute to a complicated mother and a brilliant evocation of mid-century America.

Richard Russo

Praise for On Helwig Street

This is a small masterpiece

An absorbing memoir of a town, a family, and an artist – one in which only the artist has reached his potential. Sharply observed, emotionally true and metaphorically rich

I loved this very affectionate and haunting portrayal of Russo’s mother and the glove-making world gone by. The man as a boy watching his own mother’s helpless and scattered journey through her illness, describing i ...

This is a small masterpiece

An absorbing memoir of a town, a family, and an artist – one in which only the artist has reached his potential. Sharply observed, emotionally true and metaphorically rich

I loved this very affectionate and haunting portrayal of Russo’s mother and the glove-making world gone by. The man as a boy watching his own mother’s helpless and scattered journey through her illness, describing i ...

This is a small masterpiece

An absorbing memoir of a town, a family, and an artist – one in which only the artist has reached his potential. Sharply observed, emotionally true and metaphorically rich

I loved this very affectionate and haunting portrayal of Russo’s mother and the glove-making world gone by. The man as a boy watching his own mother’s helpless and scattered journey through her illness, describing i ...

Books by Richard Russo

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