by Richard Ford
Joyce Carol Oates
‘Among the very best American fiction is that of Richard Ford … he writes intense and immediate prose that glows with a mysterious light’
Independent
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Wildlife
In the autumn of 1960, Joe Brinson and his parents move to the edge of the Rocky Mountains to cash in on the promise of the American frontier, to seize a future as broad as the sweep of the Montana prairies. But when Joe’s father leaves home to fight the forest fires that have raged since the summer, and his mother meets an older man, Joe finds his life changing too suddenly, blazing into unrecognisable pieces like the forests surrounding them.
‘This is proper storytelling, lean and taut. And it is real, grown-up life. Ford captures perfectly the loneliness that can only be had in families’
New Statesman
‘Every sentence Ford writes, illuminates … His prose is strong, clear and satisfying, resonant with the bleak rhythms of unrewarded lives’
Sunday Times
‘Ford’s book observes the human animal with friendship, understanding, and an almost clinical detachment’
Independent on Sunday
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Independence Day
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award
After the disintegration of his family, the ruin of his career and an affair with a much younger woman, Frank Bascombe decides that the surest route to a ’normal’ American life is to become an estate agent in Haddam, New Jersey. Frank blunders through the suburban citadels of the Eastern Seaboard and avoids engaging in life until the sudden, cataclysmic events of a Fourth-of-July weekend with his son jolt him back.
The sequel to The Sportswriter and the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year, Independence Day is a landmark in American Literature.
‘The best novel out of America in many years … simply a masterpiece’
John Banville, Guardian
‘It is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself … Eloquently, with awkward grace, in his novels about an ordinary man, Ford has created an extraordinary epic’
The Times
‘Ford’s mature prose style, with its long, sinuous, lavishly articulate sentences, is now one of the glories of modern American writing’
Jonathan Raban, Observer
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Women with Men
Three outstanding novellas, depicting with a heartwrenching honesty the limits of human love. Against settings that range from the alleyways of Paris to the northern plains of Montana and the suburbs of Chicago, Richard Ford dramatises the impasses and abysses that exist in all romantic relationships. Capturing men and women at defining moments of truth – whether during seismic arguments, or simply in the course of everyday life – Ford affirms yet again his reputation as one of the great American writers of our time.
‘At once funny and heartbreaking, as Ford’s work usually is … This is fiction at its finest’
John Banville
‘Here are three perfect "long" stories, so sinuously entwined and so subtly echoing one another that the whole towers like a great novel’
Mail on Sunday
‘Sparkling … The stories are both powerful fictions in their own right and a perfectly formed triptych’
Sunday Telegraph
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A Multitude of Sins
With perhaps his fiercest intensity to date, Richard Ford, America’s most unflinching chronicler of modern life, is drawn to amorous relationships inside, out and to the sides of marriage. In these extraordinary stories all human relations, our entire sense of right and wrong, are put into vivid and unforgettable play.
‘Ford’s is the voice of twentieth-century America; funny, human, sad and real’
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Now in its full maturity, his writing rolls and twists with complexities and sadness and humour; his characters may not often have lives they call their own, but his sentences always do’
Observer
‘Ford’s sheer mastery of the short-story form is jaw-dropping’
Guardian
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The Lay of the Land
With The Sportswriter, in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later – after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award – was hailed by The Times as ’an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself’. Frank Bascombe’s story resumes in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together.
He’s now, at fifty-five, plying his trade as a real estate agent on the Jersey shore and contending with health, marital, and familial issues that have his full attention. This is Richard Ford’s first novel in more than a decade: the funniest, most engaging and explosive book he’s written.
‘Bascombe’s voice remains one of the most generous and wise in contemporary fiction, the honest testimony of a pilgrim seeking the transcendent in a decidedly mundane world’ Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times
‘My great book of the year … so wonderfully written in every breath of every sentence’
Hermione Lee, Guardian
‘Engaging, brilliant, hugely sad and, of course, ultimately uplifting. As with the other two, I’ll read it again and again’
William Leith, Evening Standard
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First published in Great Britain 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Ford
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Frontispiece photography © iStockphoto.com/Andrew Penner
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ISBN 978 1 4088 2841 0
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