Canada: A Novel Part 19

*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

Click for more information Rock Springs In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West a and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter; an unhappy girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiselled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

*Marvellous ... Rock Springs confirms Ford's place among our finest writers'

The Times

*These are beautifully imagined and crafted stories. By turns heart-rending and wickedly funny a and just plain wicked. Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice a and Rock Springs is the very poetry of realism'

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

Click for more information 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 friends.h.i.+p, understanding, and an almost clinical detachment'

Independent on Sunday

Click for more information 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 Bas...o...b.. 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

Click for more information 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 impa.s.ses and abysses that exist in all romantic relations.h.i.+ps. Capturing men and women at defining moments of truth a whether during seismic arguments, or simply in the course of everyday life a 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

Click for more information A Mult.i.tude of Sins With perhaps his fiercest intensity to date, Richard Ford, America's most unflinching chronicler of modern life, is drawn to amorous relations.h.i.+ps 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.