In each of these tales master storyteller Richard Ford is drawn to the themes of intimacy, love, and their failures. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound; an exacting career woman celebrates Christmas with her adamantly post-nuclear family; a couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardour that has disappeared, both gradually and suddenly, from their lives; on a spring evening's drive, a young wife confesses to her husband the affair she had with the host of the dinner party they're about to join.

Two men, one in search of a woman, the other in search of his true self, meet in a bizarre household on an uncharted island hideaway in the Mississippi. Richard Ford's first novel is brutal, yet often moving and funny.

The Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel for 1996.In this visionary sequel to The Sportswriter, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America. Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

A brilliant new work that returns Richard Ford to the hallowed territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the world of Frank Bascombe, and the landscape of his celebrated novels The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land.

In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely-discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe — protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate — we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century.

Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.

In Silver Wood, the animals live together peacefully, fearing only the violence of Man. But the oldest, wisest animals know that one day a human rescuer will join them and grow up to save the green and pleasant places of the world. One crystal-clear Christmas Eve the legend begins to come to life.

Brock the badger finds a baby boy abandoned in the snowy woods. As he grows up among the animals, Nab's destiny becomes clear: he is the one who will journey across the land to gather one by one from their Elflord guardians the three Faradawn, the magical essences of life itself. Only when he has them will he be prepared for his final confrontation with the very face of evil.

But even with the help of his animal friends, and of the golden-haired Beth, his only human companion, Nab’s quest has become a race against time, for Man in his folly is moving with terrible speed towards his own destruction.

‘A blend of Tolkien and Watership Down unfolded in masterly style. Ford not only writes superbly, his intimate knowledge of animals and the countryside shines through every page… a sensitive, exciting and engrossing novel which puts the author among the first rank of contemporary English novelists’

MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS

‘Comparisons between Ford’s first novel and Watership Down as well as with the fantasies of Tolkien, are inevitable. But this enchanting fable stands as a creation even more pertinent to our times than those honoured works… the author’s artistry has created a parable for our time’

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West — and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. This is a story collection about ordinary women, men and children.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

A New York Times Best Book of the Year

A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father — Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people-men, mostly-who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring.

In this novel of menace and eroticism, Richard Ford updates the tradition of Conrad for the age of cocaine smuggling. The setting is Oaxaca, Mexico, where Harry Quinn has come to free his girlfriend's brother, Sonny, from Jail and, ideally, to get him away form the suavely sadistic drug dealer who suspects Sonny of having cheated him.

"His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico."-New York Times Book Review

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. But when Joe's father leaves home to fight the forest fires and his mother meets an older man, Joe finds his life suddenly changing beyond recognition.

As Ford's women and men each experience the consolations and complications of relationships with the opposite sex, they must confront the difference between privacy and intimacy and the distinction between pleasing another and pleasing oneself.