Some of Richard Russo’s most memorable novels have depicted hard times in small towns. His 1986 debut, Mohawk, and 2007’s Bridge of Sighs both played out in fictional blue-collar backwaters in upstate New York, places where the leather industry had ground to a halt but citizens struggled on. For his career-defining, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls (2001), Russo created a new deteriorating town in Maine that was blighted by an abandoned textile mill and shirt factory, and home to Miles Roby, the resilient manager of a diner. At one point, Miles’s daughter summed up her dead-end surroundings when explaining why she was happy to attend church on her recent vacation but did not do so at home: “It was easier to believe in God, she said, or at least the possibility of God, on Martha’s Vineyard than it was in Empire Falls.”