Roscoe

“Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter” (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed

Its V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albanys notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But theres no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters.

Every step leads back to the past—to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machines fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond.

William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.