New York, NY: Knopf (1995)

Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he’s still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He’s still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son and visit as many sports halls of fame as they can fit into two days. Frank’s Independence Day, however, turns out not as he’d planned, and this decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge.” Independence Day captures the mystery of life — in all its conflicted glory — with grand humour, intense compassion and transfixing power.

New York, NY: Knopf (1997)

“This is Ford’s voice at its best…. Nobody now writing looks more like an American classic”. — The New York Times Book Review In his first volume of short fiction since the acclaimed Rock Springs, Richard Ford creates a portrait gallery of male characters who are as wounded, as rueful, and as touchingly vulnerable as Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Independence Day. Here is the traveling salesman who congratulates himself on his happy marriage even as he probes the defenses of a vulnerable divorcee. Here is the stoic seventeen-year-old who is just beginning to apprehend the chaotic undercurrents of his parents’ lives. Here is an aspiring novelist, stranded in a foreign country with a lover who may need him far more than she lets on. Passionate and ironic, written with an economy of words and vast reserves of feeling, Women with Men creates a poetry of American manhood in the traditions of Hemingway, O’Hara, and Sam Shepard. “Breathtaking…. Women with Men is sumptuous and quietly realized, and it’s signature Ford”. — Boston Globe “One of America’s most accomplished practitioners of the art of the story”. — Newsday

New York, NY: Ecco Press. (2012)

“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”

Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons’ parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents’ arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents’ robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, “Canada” is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.

New York, NY: Knopf (2002)

Only a storyteller of Ford’s remarkable agility and seriousness could produce such a rich array of stories on the single, dramatic theme of love and intimacy. A Multitude of Sins evokes, with unflinching candor, our failures to achieve what we consider to be most important: to be faithful and sincere, empathetic and patient, to be honest and passionate and finally loving toward those we care for or merely, if desperately, desire. As in all of Ford’s work, the settings are as distinct as Montreal is from New Orleans, or Maine from the Grand Canyon. Yet in each he is drawn to the relations between women and men — liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. It is in these relations, his extraordinary stories suggest, that our entire sense of right and wrong is enacted, and the fierce intensity he brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date.