Best Selling Books by Richard Russo

Richard Russo, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool (1993) a “confident, assured novel [that] sweeps the reader up,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle back then. “Simple as family love, yet nearly as complicated.” Or, as The Boston Globe put it, “a big, rambunctious novel with endless riffs and unstoppable human hopefulness.”

The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it's hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years . . . the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends . . . Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who's obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might've been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident . . . Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing . . . and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there's Charice Bond—a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer's office—as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station.

Everybody's Fool is filled with humor, heart, hard times and people you can't help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so stridently human. This is classic Russo—and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Louis Charles Lynch (also known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. He and Sarah, his wife of forty years, are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. Perhaps for this reason Lucy is writing the story of his town, his family, and his own life that makes up this rich and mesmerizing novel, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and has never looked back.Bridge of Sighs, from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, is a moving novel about small-town America that expands Russo's widely heralded achievement in ways both familiar and astonishing.From the Trade Paperback edition.

"Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion's widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke out whatever meager promise isn't already boarded up.". "Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom from the Empire Grill, an opportunity of his youth that has become the albatross of his daily and future life. Called back from college and set to work by family obligation - his mother ailing, his father a loose cannon - Miles never left home again. Even so, his own obligations are manifold: a pending divorce; a troubled younger brother; and, not least, a peculiar partnership in the failing grill with none other than Mrs. Whiting. All of these, though, are offset by his daughter, Tick, whom he guides gently and proudly through the tribulations of adolescence." "A decent man encircled by history and dreams, by echoing churches and abandoned mills, by the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors, Miles is also a patient, knowing guide to the rich, hardscrabble nature of Empire Falls: fathers and sons and daughters, living and dead, rich and poor alike."--BOOK JACKET.

The third book in the North Bath trilogy. Complications arise among residents after the town of North Bath is annexed by neighboring Schuyler Springs and an unidentified body is discovered.

Three men in their 60s who met in college reunite on Martha’s Vineyard, where mysterious events occurred in 1971.

This work is the author's memoir of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. Anyone familiar with the author's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a good-time, second-fiddle father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon. A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations, recounted here, only to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both.

In 1750, without warning or apparent reason, the mineral springs of the colonial resort town of Bath, New York, ran dry. A little more than two hundred years later, after numerous warnings and for too many reasons, Sully, the unluckiest man in this unlucky town, isn't doing too hot either. He's broke, out of a job, and the owner of a dead pickup truck. The good news? Sully has the dumbest man in North Bath as his devoted friend, a long-suffering, long-married woman who loves him, a forgiving eighty-year-old landlady who converses with her late husband, a spastic doberman as a watchdog, and the finest one-legged drunken Jewish lawyer this side of Albany. Now, if Sully could only banish his father's slyly grinning ghost and earn his own son's respect, he might just turn the whole damn thing around. Nobody's Fool is a funny, roguish novel that captures the imagination and provides a rich journey into a special world peopled by characters so real, so vital, we feel we've known them all our lives. As he did with his critically acclaimed Mohawk and The Risk Pool, Richard Russo brilliantly invents an unforgettable and luminously magical time and place. And, in doing so, Russo secures his place among America's great writers and most captivating storytellers.

For two decades Ned is shuttled back and forth between his mother, Jenny, and his father, Sam, after Sam abandoned them and now Ned struggles to win his father's affection while avoiding his sins.