Part 19 (1/2)

*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.