Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada. His short story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Sorry for Your Trouble, Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Kristina Ford.Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels have captured the entire sweep of a peculiar, boomerish generation in the US ... He’s still an observer of American life in all its excesses, absurdities and desperations ... Now he has the wisdom and wistfulness that comes with impending mortality
Observer
‘<b>A literary project matched in ambition only by John Updike’s <i>Rabbit </i>series</b> … The greatest ambition of all is that Ford has decided to make this grim material into <b>a bright comedy</b>, and has succeeded’<b></b>
Financial Times
‘Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe series - stands as <b>one of the finest achievements of modern American fiction</b>. Frank’s story comes to a fittingly mordant and brilliant conclusion in <i>Be Mine </i>… a joyful reminder that close attention to lived life is both renewing and affirming’
The Independent
<p><b>‘</b>While the portrayal of a father-son bond torqued by the burden of illness is desperately moving, <br /> the snap and crunch of Ford’s finely hewn prose remains<b> an endless pleasure’</b></p>
Daily Mail
‘A funny book, with Frank and Paul’s dialogue – decades of love contained within – reading at times like a comedy double act’<b></b>
Irish Times
<b>‘Wounding and hilarious …</b> <b>The quality of Ford’s prose leaves the reader breathless</b>; there are sentences and paragraphs here you could read and re-read without ever tiring of doing so<i>’</i>
Business Post
‘The laureate of the American middle-class middle man … Great’ <b><i></i></b>
Telegraph
‘Few writers have captured contemporary American life as incisively as Richard Ford … Bascombe is a memorable literary creation – one of the most complicated and unique characters of our age – and these first-person novels, so resonant in setting and so strong in plot, are full of pathos, as well as being <b>nuanced, wickedly funny depictions of contemporary American life'</b>
Independent
'Ford’s world is contingent, frightening, beautiful, comically manifold'
Guardian
<b>'</b>Frank is heroic in his own quotidian way. He holds himself together the way you and I hold ourselves together (or try to): by snatching at straws in the maelstrom of everyday life. That’s the power of the Bascombe novels.<b> Ford creates a reading experience that feels truer than your own experience </b>… Think of <i>Be Mine </i>as a chance to spend a last few hours with a friend'
The Times
‘Ford is a master of first-person narratives in which there is space for philosophical reflection as well as telling human detail’
Mail on Sunday
‘Comic elegy … A picaresque record of American boomerdom … Wonderful’
Novel of the Month, The Oldie
<p><b>Praise for Richard Ford:</b><br /><br />'A masterful writer'</p>
Raymond Carver
'Ford writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight'
Observer
'A marvellous writer'
John Banville
'I can't think of many other writers, living or dead, who have given me so many reasons over the years to slow down on the page and pay attention'
Times Literary Supplement
'An American master'
Daily Telegraph