About the Book

Brothers Ray and Patrick Markham live in Pennacook, Massachusetts, a despairing former mill town plagued by feral boars. It’s the type of place where streets are named for scoundrel governors and lesser Monopoly properties, where even Dr. Chong, the high-school principal, can’t bear to mingle with the locals in her free time.

Ray serves as Patrick’s legal guardian. He spends his days on the Bounty Bag deli line, making a mean meatball sandwich, critiquing Muscles Carbonara’s obscenely suggestive deal flyers, and studiously ducking any thought of his future. But Ray’s tick-like comfort in the static here and now is wildly disrupted when Patrick runs away and a greedy board of directors fires Angie Martini, Bounty Bag’s great-hearted CEO, turning Bounty Bag upside down with worker protests.

Dr. Chong has troubles of her own. She’s on a longshot campaign for a tax-cap override to fund a less-carcinogenic building for Andrew Johnson Memorial High School. But as Election Day nears, the meltdown at Bounty Bag threatens to gut her already shoestring tax base.

Patrick, meanwhile, has fallen into a scam targeting Ray’s own deli. Things look bleak—until he lucks into the classroom of the dying Mr. Grant, whose demanding history class gets him thinking more deeply, about Pennacook, Bounty Bag, and his own past and future.

Read some of the book!

Praise for Eric Giroux’s Ring On Deli:

[A] rich, incisive story that vividly illustrates the inequities in the American economy and offers a serious look at those fighting to hold on to what they have and those who join them in the fight. Whether you call it a page-turner, a must-read, or a story you can’t put down at night, Ring On Deli lives up to every enthusiastically positive description about a novel.
IndieReader (5 out of 5 stars, IndieReader Approved,
a “Best-Reviewed Books—July 2020”)
This author has talent to burn.
Publishers Weekly
Giroux’s prose is reminiscent of Richard Russo’s writing: intricate and incisive, though always full of warmth and humor. . . . A well-balanced comic tale that deftly grapples with larger contemporary themes.
Kirkus Reviews
WINNER, 2021 National Indie Excellence Award (Comedy)
I devoured Ring On Deli in a kind of helium trance, agog at its antic intelligence, its knowing humor, and its generosity of heart. Eric Giroux’s Pennacook is a bountiful land indeed, rich in local history and drama and small, beleaguered institutions, along with those small, beleaguered humans who against considerable odds (and herds of roaming boars) keep them going. It has the charm of some heady contemporary fable, in which the whole business model we call America is transformed back into some weirdly plausible, even utopian experiment.
Robert Cohen, author of Amateur Barbarians
From a small town budget referendum to a supermarket revolution to roving packs of wild boar. Like his Yankee forebears Tom Perrotta and John Irving, Eric Giroux mashes together hot-button social issues and wacky slapstick with a keen eye and a big heart. Ring On Deli is a zany, high-energy, absolutely satisfying satire of American appetites.
Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster
Ring On Deli is a funny and imaginative riff on the real life story of Market Basket, in which millions protested the ouster of the supermarket’s beloved CEO. Set in a small New England town, Ring On Deli is an off-beat primer on American business which offers a heartwarming and engaging story of people willing to fight to protect an institution.
Daniel Korschun, co-author of We Are Market Basket:
The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement
that Saved a Beloved Business
It’s the Great Recession, and feral pigs are roaming the shuttered streets of Pennacook. As big business arrives to claim Bounty Bag, the town’s family-owned grocery store, brothers Ray and Patrick find themselves taking sides in a fight that alternately divides and unites their friends and neighbors. Tackling important socioeconomic issues with equal parts humor and compassion, Giroux has a comic’s sense of timing, a journalist’s eye for detail, and a poet’s love of language. We need more novels like Ring On Deli, perhaps now more than ever.
David Eric Tomlinson, author of The Midnight Man
Rowsing and rewarding
Foreword Reviews
[A] rich, incisive story that vividly illustrates the inequities in the American economy and offers a serious look at those fighting to hold on to what they have and those who join them in the fight. Whether you call it a page-turner, a must-read, or a story you can’t put down at night, Ring On Deli lives up to every enthusiastically positive description about a novel.
IndieReader (5 out of 5 stars, IndieReader Approved,
a “Best-Reviewed Books—July 2020”)
This author has talent to burn.
Publishers Weekly

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