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.