Mohawk

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series--and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, "Empire Falls"--Richard Russo's "Mohawk" remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, "Mohawk" is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations--and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys--these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself. For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or "Our Town," in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

Richard Russo in 1986. His novels <i>The Risk Pool</i>, <i>Nobody’s Fool</i> and <i>Straight Man</i> are available in Vintage paperback. He now lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters.