Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, two collections of stories, a collection of essays, and a memoir. Chances Are … (Penguin Random House), his first stand-alone novel in 10 years, is an absorbing saga in which the bonds of friendship prove as constricting, and rewarding, as those of family or any other community. One beautiful September day, three men, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties, convene on Martha’s Vineyard. Each holds his own secrets, in addition to the mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend on the Vineyard in 1971: the disappearance of the woman they all loved. As the weekend unfolds, their entire lives are displayed, while the past confounds the present. Publishers Weekly’s review noted that Russo’s Chances Are … “mixes his signature themes—father-and-son relationships, unrequited love, New England small-town living, and the hiccups of aging—with stealthy clue-dropping in a slow-to-build mystery. […] This is vintage Russo.”
