Nobodys Fool

***The 1994 movie Nobody's Fool based on Richard Russo's book stars Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy and Melanie Griffith***

Richard Russo's slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected operation 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 a 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.

'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.' ? Sunday Times

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

'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.' ? Financial Times

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

'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.' ? Vogue