Wildlife (20 page)

‘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

At dawn on Good Friday every year, Frank Bascombe and his wife meet to pay their respects at the grave of their firstborn. This year Frank plans to spend the Easter weekend with a new girlfriend while on assignment for his magazine. What might have been an idyllic adventure becomes a succession of calamities that extinguish almost all the carefully nourished equilibrium of a man grappling with the failure of love and the death of his son.

The end and the aftermath of a marriage, the emotional dislocation and the discovery of a new life while in the embrace of troubled memories of the old have seldom been more harrowingly plotted.
The Sportswriter
is also a wistful, very funny and always human illumination of domestic and sexual anguish through the story of Frank Bascombe, its hero, the sportswriter.

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award

‘The best novel out of America in many years … simply a masterpiece’
John Banville,
Guardian

‘It is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself … Eloquently, with awkward grace, in his novels about an ordinary man, Ford has created an extraordinary epic’
The Times

After the disintegration of his family, the ruin of his career and an affair with a much younger woman, Frank Bascombe 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.

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‘His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico’
New York Times

‘Ford’s taut, compelling prose is as piercingly clear as a police siren. No other storyteller writes about the alienated and uncommitted with such mastery’
Sunday Times

Harry Quinn and his girlfriend Rae head to Oaxaca, Mexico, to spring Rae’s brother Sunny from jail and protect him from the sinister drug dealer he is suspected of having double-crossed. But instead of a simple jailbreak, Harry and Rae fall into a nightmarish series of entanglements with expat whores and Zapotec Indians. The Cocaine Era’s answer to Graham Greene, this exquisitely choreographed novel tracks Rae’s and Harry’s inexorable descent into the Mexican underworld, where only a stroke of ultimate good luck can keep them alive.

‘So hard-boiled and tough that it might have been written on the back of a trench coat. A grand
Maltese Falcon
of a novel’
Stanley Elkin

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‘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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‘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.

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www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including
The Sportswriter
,
Independence Day
,
Wildlife
,
A Multitude of Sins
and most recently
The Lay of the Land
.
Independence Day
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

NOVELS

A Piece of My Heart

The Ultimate Good Luck

The Sportswriter

Independence Day

The Lay of the Land

Canada

SHORT FICTION

Rock Springs

Women with Men: Three Stories

A Multitude of Sins

First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill 1990
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Richard Ford 1990

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408835135

www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

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