"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.

Risk Pool

RICHARD RUSSO

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Mohawk

Vintage

At age fifty, Professor William Henry Devereaux, Jr, has more than a mid-life crisis to deal with. As a child, his parents found him merely exasperating. As an adult, and interim chair of the English Department, he is careening out of control. Half in love with three women, unable to understand his daughter or come to terms with his father, Hank has a dangerous philosophy that life, even an academic life, could be simpler, and that endless discussions and negotiation might profitably be replaced by provocation or simple extortion. He is a man in thrall to the perversity principle. Packed with memorable characters and scenes of pure genius, "Straight Man" is exhilarating, hilarious and deeply moving - an unforgettable portrait of a middle aged man caught somewhere between cause and effect.

Straight Man

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of R

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.

Contemporary

Bridge of Sighs

Vintage Books USA

That Old Cape Magic

Nobody's Fool

It is Thanksgiving in North Bank and Sully, old Miss Beryl's feckless lodger, does not have much to be thankful for. His arthritic knee is acting up and so is his truck; his ex-wife is at the end of her tether, his mistress is giving him the cold shoulder, and the grinning ghost of his father won't leave him alone. The future looks bleak when Sully's son Peter, a morose college professor, returns, offering Sully a chance to address a lifetime of neglected responsibilities and threatening his carefree existence.

Vintage Books

British & Irish

Sceptre

A wonderfully funn and perceptive novel in the traditions of Thornton Wilder and Anne Tyler, The Risk Pool is set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult.His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Risk Pool

Random House Audio |

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Books by RICHARD RUSSO