Mohawk

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series amp;mdash; and reissued now in audiobook amp;mdash; 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 more than a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations amp;mdash; and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys amp;mdash; 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.