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Also by Richard Russo:

Elsewhere: A Memoir, November 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
That Old Cape Magic, August 2009
Hardcover
A Healing Touch, June 2008
Hardcover
Bridge of Sighs, October 2007
Hardcover
Empire Falls, May 2005
Paperback
The Whore's Child: Stories, July 2003
Paperback
Empire Falls, April 2002
Paperback
Straight Man, June 1998
Paperback
Mohawk, April 1994
Paperback
The Risk Pool, April 1994
Paperback
Nobody's Fool, April 1994
Paperback

THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC
By: Richard Russo

Knopf
August 2009
On Sale: August 4, 2009
272 pages
ISBN: 0375414967
EAN: 9780375414961
Hardcover
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Fiction

Following Bridge of Sighs—a national best seller hailed by The Boston Globe as “an astounding achievement” and “a masterpiece”—Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father’s ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents’ respite from the hated Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that’s now thirty years old and has largely come true. He’d left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain; they’d moved into an old house full of character; and they’d started a family. Check, check and check.

But be careful what you pray for, especially if you manage to achieve it. By the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura’s, on the coast of Maine, Griffin’s chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?

That Old Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, his daughter’s new life and, finally, what it was he thought he wanted and what in fact he has. The storytelling is flawless throughout, moments of great comedy and even hilarity alternating with others of rueful understanding and heart-stopping sadness, and its ending is at once surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.

Media Buzz

Fresh Air - NPR - August 18, 2009