In his first audiobook since the bestselling "Forever," Hamill returns with alove story set during the Depression against the backdrop of some of New YorkCitys toughest streets.

"The North River is what real New Yorkers call the Hudson. Two blocks from its shore, Dr. James Finbar Delaney lives on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. He is a GP, servicing the indigent poor. A wounded veteran of World War I, he is despondent that his wife, Molly, has deserted him and that his only child, Grace, has left her son, two-year-old Carlito, in his care. In the dead of winter in the Depression year of 1934, Dr. Delaney knows "the cause of death was always life." Delaney is numb from the war and the abandonment of his family. When he saves the life of gangster friend Eddie Corso, Italian hood Frankie Botts is not happy. Delaney can feel the threat to him and his grandson in his bones. To further complicate matters, the FBI shows up looking for Grace. If there's any consolation for Delaney in the chaos that has become his life, it's Carlito and Rose, his Sicilian illegal alien housekeeper, who has become little Carlito's surrogate mother — and Delaney's lover. Soon the North River comes to symbolize Delaney's tormented life, as enemies and loved ones float in it, and Grace, on a liner, returns to New York to further complicate Delaney's new, delicate household. Hamill (Forever; A Drinking Life) has crafted a beautiful novel, rich in New York City detail and ambience, that showcases the power of human goodness and how love, in its many forms, can prevail in an unfair world. 5-city author tour. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'The North River is what real New Yorkers call the Hudson. Two blocks from its shore, Dr. James Finbar Delaney lives on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. He is a GP, servicing the indigent poor. A wounded veteran of World War I, he is despondent that his wife, Molly, has deserted him and that his only child, Grace, has left her son, two-year-old Carlito, in his care. In the dead of winter in the Depression year of 1934, Dr. Delaney knows 'the cause of death was always life.' Delaney is numb from the war and the abandonment of his family. When he saves the life of gangster friend Eddie Corso, Italian hood Frankie Botts is not happy. Delaney can feel the threat to him and his grandson in his bones. To further complicate matters, the FBI shows up looking for Grace. If there's any consolation for Delaney in the chaos that has become his life, it's Carlito and Rose, his Sicilian illegal alien housekeeper, who has become little Carlito's surrogate mother — and Delaney's lover. Soon the North River comes to symbolize Delaney's tormented life, as enemies and loved ones float in it, and Grace, on a liner, returns to New York to further complicate Delaney's new, delicate household. Hamill (Forever; A Drinking Life) has crafted a beautiful novel, rich in New York City detail and ambience, that showcases the power of human goodness and how love, in its many forms, can prevail in an unfair world. 5-city author tour. (June)' Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)"

"Pete Hamill, one of the big honchos of New York journalism in the 1960s and "70s, has retreated in recent years from his hard-knuckled metropolitan reportage in favor of idealized portraits of old New York, particularly in the Depression and post-World War II years.

His best-seller 'Snow in August' begins with an Irish Catholic boy racing through a Brooklyn snowstorm in 1947 toward a... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) life-altering encounter with a rabbi. 'Forever,' his subsequent novel, is a fantasia about a man who arrives in New York in 1741 and is told he will live forever if he never leaves Manhattan.

Even his clear-eyed memoir, 'A Drinking Life,' opens on a city idyll: getting lost as a boy in Prospect Park before being saved by an ever-vigilant mother. Fathers, in Hamill's recent books, tend to be either dead or lost to drink.

Snow is prominent. Anyone who has lived in New York knows that snow there is a rarity, but it seems to be part of Hamill's novelistic point that in the "30s and "40s, those superior decades, it was there all the time.

Hamill would have us believe as well that those great years were full of good-heartedness, people caring for one another. Dr. James Delaney, the hero of Hamill's new Depression-era novel, 'North River,' is an exemplar of those virtues.

A World War I vet, he offers his services gratis to those in need ('He couldn't charge a patient who had sixty cents to last a week'). He even trudges out in one of Hamill's trademark snowstorms to care for a local gangster who's been shot by members of a rival gang. (The two are fellow veterans of the Argonne.)

But there's a thick frost covering Delaney's heart. Six months before the start of the events in 'North River,' his wife walked off, presumably in the direction of a Hudson pier, from which she may have jumped. His 20-year-old daughter, Grace, also has taken off, to Mexico with a firebrand revolutionary husband. But in the opening pages, Grace leaves Delaney with a surprise: her 3-year-old son, Carlos, along with a note asking him to take care of the boy.

Will the good-hearted but damaged doctor thaw sufficiently to do right by Carlos? Any doubt — and there's never much to begin with — is removed when Delaney hires a good-hearted but damaged young Italian widow named Rose to care for the boy. Together, they teach 'Carlito' the joys of spaghetti, braciola, New York hot dogs and Coney Island, meanwhile nosing up to the moment when Delaney finally can admit, 'I have lived too long in the country of numbness.' On their predictable journey to this moment, Delaney and Rose are assisted by a pair of good-hearted thugs named Knocko and Bootsie, characters who seem to have walked off the set of the latest remake of 'Little Miss Marker.'

It's as though Hamill's vision of the Depression is only half-composed of bread lines and 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' The other half is rooted in those Runyonesque "30s comedies in which the hardened criminals all turn out to have soft spots the size of Brooklyn. Even that might be forgivable if Hamill had bothered to work in some genuine narrative tension. But the dangers faced by Delaney & Co. don't amount to much. An early threat from the mobsters who shot Delaney's war buddy is defanged when the good doctor treats the chief mobster's mother (for a case of shingles, no less). The larger threat, that Grace will return and reclaim her child, thus jeopardizing the tenuous but satisfying little family the lovers have built in her absence, also comes to nothing: Grace is less a character than a device. The voice Hamill gives to her in her letters home — 'The problem was never you. The problem was me. I have some flaw in me, some kind of emptiness that can't be filled' — makes her a strong candidate for the Least Convincing Daughter in contemporary American fiction.

In 'Forever' Hamill wrote, 'He knew the treacheries and dangers of nostalgia. He was, after all, Irish.' That's clever, but it also avoids something. There's a line between loving the past and loving it so much that you falsify it. Too much love, as the tough-minded Rose might have told Delaney, becomes a kind of chokehold. It's not only kids who get spoiled by it; novels do, too.

" Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.comAndrew Wilson, whose most recent novel is 'The Lying Tongue'Anthony Giardina, whose novel 'White Guys' has been reissued in paperback, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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It is 1934, and New York City is in the icy grip of the Great Depression. With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors, who include gangsters, day laborers, prostitutes, and housewives. If they can't pay, he treats them anyway. But in his own life, Delaney is emotionally numb, haunted by the slaughters of the Great War. His only daughter has left for Mexico, and his wife Molly vanished months before, leaving him to wonder if she is alive or dead. Then, on a snowy New Year's Day, the doctor returns home to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep, left by his mother in Delaney's care. Coping with this unexpected arrival, Delaney hires Rose, a tough, decent Sicilian woman with a secret in her past. Slowly, as Rose and the boy begin to care for the good doctor, the numbness in Delaney begins to melt. Recreating 1930s New York with the vibrancy and rich detail that are his trademarks, Pete Hamill weaves a story of honor, family, and one man's simple courage that no reader will soon forget.