About the book: 2018 / Miles Robie has been cooking burgers at the Imperial Grill for twenty years, a job that cost him his higher education and a fair amount of self-respect. Miles is a good guy, but there is one tragic flaw in his character - he is not capable of decisive action. And his kindness is sometimes indistinguishable from his willingness to go with the flow. But the currents in the town of Empire Falls are very intricate. Even the Knox River makes a loop here, washing ashore everything it has collected above on its way. So Miles, who has been trying to escape from his stuffy hometown since his youth, is circling around his own life. Maybe he is being held here by his smart, thin-skinned daughter Tik, who cannot survive at the local school without her father’s support? Or Janine, Miles' ex-wife, who started an affair with the hopelessly narcissistic owner of the fitness club? Or is it the imperious Francine Whiting, the owner of everything in the city - and it seems that this “everything” includes Miles himself? Or maybe the need to look after an old father, too lively in his unbearable escapades? Or is it the secrets of the past that determined the lives of Miles and many others in the city? In Empire Falls, Richard Russo immerses the reader in the world of small life, where oddities, intrigues, passions, funny and tragic events are seething. Empire Falls is a humane novel, full of humor, sympathy, sadness and joy. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Richard Russo has practically never been translated into Russian (a couple of stories in a magazine version don’t count), and this is a big gap, because Russo is not only a great writer, praised by critics, awarded prizes and loved by readers, but his books should be especially close to Russian reader.