Search results for ""Author Richard Russo""
Vintage Publishing Empire Falls
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.
£9.99
Vintage Publishing The Risk Pool
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.
£10.99
Atlantic Books Trajectory
Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and On Helwig Street, a memoir. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody's Fool, was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries. He lives in Maine.
£17.99
Alfred A. Knopf Somebody's Fool: A novel
£23.53
Allen & Unwin Nobody's Fool
Richard Russo's slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected workings of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York - and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years.Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humour and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.
£10.99
Allen & Unwin Everybody's Fool
Richard Russo's new novel takes place in the decaying American town of North Bath over the course of a very busy weekend, ten years after the events of Nobody's Fool. Donald 'Sully' Sullivan is trying to ignore his cardiologist's estimate that he has only a year or two left. Ruth, his long-time lover, is increasingly distracted by her former son-in-law, fresh out of prison and intent on making trouble. Police chief Doug Raymer is tormented by the improbable death of his wife, while local wiseguy Carl Roebuck might finally be running out of luck. Filled with humour, heart and hard-luck characters you can't help but love, Everybody's Fool is a crowning achievement from one of the great storytellers of our time.
£10.99
Vintage Publishing Straight Man
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.
£9.99
Atlantic Books Somebody's Fool
'A wise and witty drama of small-town life . . . delivering the generous humour, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity's foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades' Publishers WeeklyTen years after the death of the magnetic Donald 'Sully' Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-boyfriend. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully's married ex-lover, struggles to understand her granddaughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter's other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town's residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed. Brimming with warmth, wisdom and Russo's signature wry humour, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master of storytelling.
£14.99
Atlantic Books The Destiny Thief
Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and On Helwig Street, a memoir. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody's Fool, was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries. He lives in Maine.
£18.99
Vintage Publishing Mohawk
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.
£10.99
Everyman Collected Nonfiction Volume 2: Selections from the Memoirs and Travel Writings
Twain's playful exuberance and remarkable storytelling gifts are on full display as he regales readers with his real-life adventures, some of them so outrageous they cannot be true - or can they? As Richard Russo says in his fascinating introduction, Twain was an 'inspired, indeed, unparalleled, bullshitter' who himself cheerfully relates how as a cub reporter out West he had elevated a routine Indian attack on a wagon full of immigrants to a battle that 'to this day has no parallel in history' - once he knew he could get away with it.There is drama as well as comedy in his account of life on the Mississippi, and great sadness too when his younger brother Henry is killed in a steamboat explosion - all the more poignant for the restraint with which he describes it. In The Innocents Abroad Twain the gleeful iconoclast is a passenger on a cruise ship to Europe and the Holy Land, poking fun at European snobbery and pretension and refusing to be overawed by all that History - but fully prepared to aim his satirical barbs at his fellow-tourists and indeed, squarely at himself. He also proves to be a deeply compassionate writer, as fierce in his condemnation of injustice as he is skilful in mining the humour of human folly. He brought to literature a new, distinctly American voice - and he harboured as rich and fertile a blend of contradictions as the dynamic nation he came to embody and define.
£15.00