Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He has published eight novels and four collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and the New York Times bestseller, Canada. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Falkner Award for Fiction, the first time the same book had won both prizes. Let Me Be Frank with You was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, and most recently was awarded the Prix Femina Étranger in France and the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature in Spain. Richard Ford lives in Maine with his wife.An extraordinary piece of writing... The act of writing those loves, has been if anything, Ford suggests, less poignant for him than a "source of immense exhilaration." His readers, those with parents, and those without them, will feel that too
Observer
Full of gentle humour and a sense of lives lived well ... His great effection for his parents is everywhere evident ... In this superbly written account, Ford pieces together fragments of their lives, and brings them wonderfully to life
Sunday Times
The US novelist and short story writer offers a touching recollection that is also a vivid portrait of mid-20th-century American life
Guardian
One of America's most gifted human anthropologists ... Their manners and affections, pleasures and frustrations take on weight through unsentimental but tender renderings ... So what are we left with in the end ...through ellipses, expressions of love, and the very fact of his biographical endeavour, is a testament to the art of writing
Big Issue in Scotland
An exercise in love and economy ... Colourful, thoughtful and restrained, it points to all the gaps in parents’ lives that children know nothing of, and never think to ask. Ostensibly spartan, <i>Between Them</i> is almost as rich in what you are left to read between the lines as in what is actually set in print
Sunday Herald, Books of the Year
Through anecdotes and the odd photograph, he builds a portrait of mid-century America
- Cultural calendar for the months ahead, Daily Telegraph
<b>Stylish, elegiac and funny … A marvellous writer</b>
- John Banville,
The enjoyment of reading Richard Ford is about the exquisite pleasure of acquisition of language … The harder you look, the sadder and funnier it gets
Observer
<b>Ford is possessed of a writer's greatest gifts ... Pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation ... Ford's language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within</b>
- Lorrie Moore,
A true master of the modern American novel
Independent
<b>A richly textured, rolling and poetic voice</b>
The Times
What is depicted is exactly what is seen, a peculiar miracle of transcription and feeling … The superb sense of life, of observation and feeling, enacted on every page
- Philip Hensher,
<b>Ford makes you ponder so deeply the way that none of us can fathom life's inherent strangeness</b>
- Douglas Kennedy,
As a narrator of apparently inconsequential lives, he never assumes the rights of a novelist to know what’s beneath the surface … <b>His observations are so acute that this brief book is worth dozens of longer ones by writers who notice less</b>
Daily Telegraph
In the much anticipated memoir, the author of <i>The Sportswriter</i> pays tribute to his parents
Irish Times 'Books to Look Out for in 2017'
The writer Richard Ford’s great talent is capturing American lives of a kind of quiet desperation … He is a master at the comedy and tragedies of family life … Heartfelt, evocative, but evasive portrait of his mother and father
Independent
A beautiful, very profound work … It was a book he wanted to write and while the prose has his singular languid ease, humanity and wry humour, there is also poignancy and pathos. By writing about his parents he has immortalised two people whose lives otherwise would have gone unnoticed “like most people” and he has also provided an extraordinary insight in the making of one of the world’s finest living writers … His genius lies in the slow, effortlessly long sentences, the rhythmic prose and the curiosity which drives his fiction, along with his distinctive first-person voice – conversational, confiding, unrelenting. Most of all, it appears effortless
Irish Times
The acclaimed author of the Frank Bascombe series turns his novelist’s eye to the lives of his own parents. Through two distinct portraits, Ford explores separation within a family ... a moving and strangely disturbing book
Financial Times, Summer Reading
A brilliant, affecting meditation on filial love and loss … Rendered, as ever, in the stoic Southern cadences of Ford’s prose
Times Literary Supplement, Summer Reading
Ford’s short memoir about his parents … is imaginatively generous, striking in its eloquence, and rare for its lack of narcissism. Though very different from Ford’s famous Frank Bascombe novels, it is emblematic of his project there, which deals with “the normal, applauseless life of us all”
Daily Telegraph, Summer Reading
I’ll be taking Richard Ford’s memoir <i>Between Them: Remembering My Parents </i>in my own book bag in preparation for interviewing the author at the Edinburgh book festival
Kirsty Wark, Observer
An evocative portrait
Alasdair Lees, Independent
There’s ruthless intimacy in Richard Ford’s <i>Between Them</i>, a pared, novella-length memoir of his ordinary, decent, loving mother and father written 30 years apart
Sunday Herald, Books of the Year