Empire Falls

Another fine performance... This is a big novel with a full canvas of human passions. Russo, a humane and traditional teller of truths, sustains his story and his readers

Irish Times

His natural grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion for his characters

John Irving

Richard Russo can write like Edith Wharton leavened with a touch of David Lodge

Economist

Like Anne Tyler, Russo is interested in how people rub along; in kindness and responsibility; in cutting slack without being asked. In the Empire Grill he has created a place so involving that not only can you see and smell it, but you start to feel a bit left out of the gin rummy. Russo makes an enormous job of story-telling look effortless. He is, in all the best senses of the word, a natural

Sunday Times

Russo writes with a warm, vibrant humanity

Washington Post

Russo's command of his story is unerring... He satisfies every expectation without lapsing into predictability, and the last section of the book explodes with surprises...One of the best novelists around

New York Times

Russo's inimitable blend of Eudora Welty, Anne Tyler and Booth Tarkington, removed to declining New England and graced with surprises all his own, makes for terrific reading, fast, funny and illuminating

Chicago Tribune

The world of Empire Falls is at least distantly related to those of John Cheever's Wapshot novels... an unpretentious master of fictional technique whose deeper wisdom expresses itself in the distinctive fallibility, decency, humor, and grace of the indisputably, irresistibly real people he puts on the page

Boston Globe

I loved Richard Russo's Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls, a moving, brilliantly imagined and intensely satisfying novel about the slow death of a small town: Russo's characters are as loveable and as exasperating as family

Nick Hornby