Rock Springs
Page 23
‘I am enormously delighted to make the acquaintance of this muscular American writer, whose glowering prose, in hot mode or in cool, throbs with the weight of the vast continent he lovingly embraces’
Independent
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
The Sportswriter
‘Ford is a masterful writer’
Raymond Carver
‘A devastating chronicle of contemporary alienation’
New York Times
‘Richard Ford’s sportswriter is a rare bird in life and nearly extinct in fiction’
Tobias Wolff
At dawn on Good Friday every year, Frank Bascombe and his wife meet to pay their respects at the grave of their firstborn. This year Frank plans to spend the Easter weekend with a new girlfriend while on assignment for his magazine. What might have been an idyllic adventure becomes a succession of calamities that extinguish almost all the carefully nourished equilibrium of a man grappling with the failure of love and the death of his son.
The end and the aftermath of a marriage, the emotional dislocation and the discovery of a new life while in the embrace of troubled memories of the old have seldom been more harrowingly plotted. The Sportswriter is also a wistful, very funny and always human illumination of domestic and sexual anguish through the story of Frank Bascombe, its hero, the sportswriter.
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
The Ultimate Good Luck
’His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico’
New York Times
‘Ford’s taut, compelling prose is as piercingly clear as a police siren. No other storyteller writes about the alienated and uncommitted with such mastery’
Sunday Times
Harry Quinn and his girlfriend Rae head to Oaxaca, Mexico, to spring Rae’s brother Sunny from jail and protect him from the sinister drug dealer he is suspected of having double-crossed. But instead of a simple jailbreak, Harry and Rae fall into a nightmarish series of entanglements with expat whores and Zapotec Indians. The Cocaine Era’s answer to Graham Greene, this exquisitely choreographed novel tracks Rae’s and Harry’s inexorable descent into the Mexican underworld, where only a stroke of ultimate good luck can keep them alive.
‘So hard-boiled and tough that it might have been written on the back of a trench coat. A grand Maltese Falcon of a novel’
Stanley Elkin
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
Wildlife
‘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
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.
‘Ford writes carefully and with simplicity that is not deceptive but extremely difficult to achieve, about powerless, uninformed people and their surroundings, in close-up’
Victoria Glendinning, The Times
‘What is satisfying in Wildlife is its density. 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
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
Women with Men
’Richard Ford is one of the best writers in America. Potentially the very best’
Gordon Burn
‘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
Three outstanding novellas, depicting with a heart-wrenching 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.
‘This sparkling collection sees the author of Independence Day at the top of his form. The stories are both powerful fictions in their own right and a perfectly formed triptych’
Sunday Telegraph
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford
The Lay of the Land
‘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
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.
Buy this book at www.bloomsbury.com/richardford