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.



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.



Nobody's Fool is big, funny and richly human, a garrulous book that buttonholes you in the first few pages and does not let you go... In Sully, Russo has created a character you cannot resist.



Like Anne Tyler, Russo is interested in how people rub along; in kindness and responsibility; in cutting slack without being asked...Russo makes an enormous job of story-telling look effortless. He is, in all the best senses of the word, a natural.



A rude, comic, harsh, galloping story of four generations of small-town losers, the best literary portrait of the backwater burg since Main Street.



Russo lifts a generous slice of middle America in all its flavours... Nobody's Fool is a great-hearted, unforgettable comedy in the best tradition of John Irving and Anne Tyler.



This is a novel of charm and wit, akin to the works of Alice Hoffman, Anne Tyler and Garrison Keillor.