Rock Springs (30 page)

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www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

'Richard Ford is one of the best writers in America. Potentially the very best'
Gordon Burn

‘At once funny and heartbreaking, as Ford's work usually is … This is fiction at its finest'
John Banville

‘Here are three perfect “long” stories, so sinuously entwined and so subtly echoing one another that the whole towers like a great novel'
Mail on Sunday

Three outstanding novellas, depicting with a heart-wrenching honesty the limits of human love. Against settings that range from the alleyways of Paris to the northern plains of Montana and the suburbs of Chicago, Richard Ford dramatises the impasses and abysses that exist in all romantic relationships. Capturing men and women at defining moments of truth – whether during seismic arguments, or simply in the course of everyday life – Ford affirms yet again his reputation as one of the great American writers of our time.

‘This sparkling collection sees the author of
Independence Day
at the top of his form. The stories are both powerful fictions in their own right and a perfectly formed triptych'
Sunday Telegraph

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www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

‘Bascombe's voice remains one of the most generous and wise in contemporary fiction, the honest testimony of a pilgrim seeking the transcendent in a decidedly mundane world' Stephen Amidon,
Sunday Times

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
as ‘an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the 20th 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, at fifty-five, plying his trade as a real estate agent on the Jersey shore and contending with health, marital, and familial issues that have his full attention. This is Richard Ford's first novel in more than a decade: the funniest, most engaging and explosive book he's written.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford