Most Popular Books by Richard Ford

''My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter'' - one of the most famous lines in American literature opens this classic, inimitable tour de force

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful roles—sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent—Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days. In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on display the prose, wit and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.

A novel of a fracturing family in 1960 Montana, "full of prose that makes the reader shiver," by the New York Times-bestselling author of Rock Springs ( Chicago Sun-Times). When Joe Brinson was sixteen, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana. But the new start didn''t go quite as planned. Jerry Brinson is a golf pro to rich country club members, but then loses the job. In reaction, he joins a firefighting crew working in the mountains—as his wife becomes entangled in an affair with one of the businessmen from the club. Told from the point of view of Joe as a grown man looking back on those days in 1960, Wildlife is a "heartbreaking and compelling" novel about love, family, and the forces that test them to the breaking point by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Canada and The Sportswriter ( Philadelphia Inquirer). The basis for a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Wildlife is "a wise, humane, and disarmingly simple novel of domestic distress" ( Entertainment Weekly). "There is at the heart of this novel a deep nostalgia for that moment when a person recognizes a true perfection in the way things once were, before the onset of ruin and great change."— The New York Times Book Review

With The Sportswriter, in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later – after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award – was hailed by The Times of London as “an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.” Frank Bascombe’s story resumes, in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together. He’s now plying his trade as a realtor on the Jersey shore and contending with health, marital and familial issues that have his full attention: “all the ways that life seems like life at age fifty-five strewn around me like poppies.” Richard Ford’s first novel in over a decade: the funniest, most engaging (and explosive) book he’s written, and a major literary event.

Ten stories from the Pultizer Prize-winning author of Independence Day

From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford’s parents—Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman—were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century. Married in 1928, they lived “alone together” on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944. For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of, how they loved each other and loved him become a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. Between Them is his vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction. Bringing his celebrated candor, wit, and intelligence to this most intimate and mysterious of landscapes—our parents’ lives—the award-winning storyteller and creator of the iconic Frank Bascombe delivers an unforgettable exploration of memory, intimacy, and love.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter comes a novel of menace and eroticism set in Oaxaca, Mexico. • "His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico." —The New York Times Book Review In this novel, Richard Ford updates the tradition of Conrad for the age of cocaine smuggling. 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.

The “extraordinary” debut novel (Newsweek) from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day tells the story of two godless pilgrims who converge on an uncharted island in the Mississippi. • “One of those books that hit you hard." —Houston Chronicle Robard Hewes has driven across the country in the service of a destructive passion. Sam Newell is seeking the missing piece of himself. When these men come together, each discovers the thing he''s looking for—amid a conflagration of violence that''s as shocking as it is inevitable.

A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them. Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.

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.

Richard Ford''s Independence Day--his sequel to The Sportswriter, and an international bestseller--is the only novel ever to have received both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, with Women With Men, he reaffirms his mastery of shorter fiction with his first collection since the widely acclaimed Rock Springs, published a decade ago. The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago, where Mr. Ford''s various characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents'' estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted salesman in early middle age, an aspiring writer, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband--they each of them contend with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. Whether alone, long married or newly met, they confront the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and a need for reliance that is tempered by fearful vulnerability. In three long stories, Richard Ford captures men and women at this complex and essential moment of truth--in the course of everyday life, or during a bleak Thanksgiving journey, seismic arguments, Christmas abroad, the sudden disappearance of a child, even a barroom shooting. And with peerless emotional nuance and authority he once again demonstrates, as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, "a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer."

First, I''ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.It was more bad instincts and bad luck that lead to Dell Parsons'' parents robbing a bank. They weren''t reckless people, but in an instant, their actions alter fifteen-year-old Dell''s sense of normal life forever. In the days that follow, he is saved before the authorities think to arrive. Driving across Montana, his life hurtles towards the unknown; a hotel in a deserted town, the violent and enigmatic Arthur Remlinger, and towards Canada itself. But, as Dell discovers, in this new world of secrets and upheaval, he is not the only one whose past lies on the other side of the border.

Sportjournalisten är den första boken i Richard Fords hyllade Bascombe-trilogi som sedan följdes av Självständighetsdagen och Som landet ligger. Här får vi för första gången möta den amerikanske antihjälten Frank Bascombe. Han är en frånskild sportjournalist som bor i en av New Yorks trygga förorter, älskar sina barn och spenderar sina dagar med att studera människor. Men livet blev inte riktigt som han hade tänkt sig. Han lider av hjärtklappning och dagdrömmar, hans karriär går inte riktigt så bra som han skulle önska. Vi får följa Frank under en påskhelg med hans nya älskarinna då allting sakta drivs till sin spets och han tvingas rannsaka sitt liv på allvar. Sportjournalisten är en gripande, stark och skarpsynt roman om det moderna USA, ensamhetens konsekvenser och kärlekens villkor. En stor roman som många kommer att känna igen sig i.