By John Russell
AN ABSORBING MULTI-GENERATIONAL STORY THAT EVOKES THE
SOUTH THE WAY IT WAS, AND THE WAY IT EVOLVED
The best books draw a picture in your mind – a picture of a time and of a place.
With evocative prose and details that put you right inside Raleigh, NC’s charmed houses in
the 1990s, author John Russell convinces the reader to stay for ever-so-meaningful
chitchat, a cooling cocktail, and the resolution to compelling family and professional drama
in All The Right Circles [Rare Bird Books, October 2019].
Jack Callahan is an outsider in his adopted hometown. A successful lawyer, he’s
spent years trying to move in all the right circles. But with his literary mother in a
sanitarium, his society marriage on the rocks, and his biggest client – Raleigh’s familyowned
newspaper the Criterion – facing a hostile takeover, he’s beginning to wonder if it’s
really worth it.
“I would like readers to wonder about what responsibility people living today have
for actions taken in the past. Are the sins of the parents visited upon the next generation?”
Russell says. “I hope readers might reflect on the nature of success, and the costs of
winning in the professional world in the U.S.”
Fans of Pat Conroy, Richard Ford and John Updike will enjoy All the Right Circles,
a rich, multi-generational story of money and morals, power and race, sex and sanity, set
in a changing America.
Praise for Favorite Sons, Russell’s first novel about to be re-released in paperback:
"... a novel of ideas sweeping grandly through more than forty years of
Southern history."
―The New York Times Book Review

John Russell is the author of Favorite Sons, which won the Sir Raleigh Award for
Fiction, and was reviewed favorably in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
Newsday, and the Charlotte Observer, and the upcoming All the Right Circles. He
has worked as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company working with Pat Conroy,
John Jay Osborn, and Richard Ford. One of the books he edited, A VIRGIL
THOMSON READER, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Russell was a lawyer and, while a Visiting Scholar at UNC, a consultant for
Homeland Security advising on bioterrorism. He joined global law firm K&L Gates as
head of the Life Sciences practice, and continued until retiring to write full time. You
can find his writing in the Los Angeles Times, Raleigh News and Observer, and
Southern Cultures.
A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, he was educated at the University of North
Carolina, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School. He and his wife divide their
time between North Carolina and Mexico.
Connect with Russell at JohnRussellBooks.com,
Facebook.com/JohnRussellAuthor, and Instagram.com/jspotrussell.