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, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. 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 school work - because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart.



In Mohawk, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard.



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.



Russo writes with sensitivity and insight.



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



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.