Wildlife

Seen through the eyes of a 16 year-old boy, this is the story of a family drawn west by dreams of oil boom prosperity only to find themselves on the margins of society, confronting the loss of work and the dissolution of the family. By the author of "A Piece of My Heart".

Literature & Fiction

FORD, RICHARD

Contemporary

Collins, Harvill

WILDLIFE.

Atlantic Monthly Press (1990)

Ford's mesmerizing first novel is the story of two godless pilgrims. 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 converge, on an uncharted island in the Mississippi, each discovers the thing he's looking for--amid a conflagration of violence that's as shocking as it is inevitable."This is one of those books that hit you hard...a story filled with breathing characters and genius-crafted dialogue between moments of consummate description.... I can't be unbiased. I'm mad for this book."--Elizabeth Ashton, Houston Chronicle

A Piece of My Heart

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

In these ten exquisite stories, first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Richard Ford 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: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and an unhappy girlfriend in a stolen, cranberry-colored Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; and two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

Rock Springs

THE SPORTSWRITER.

Vintage

When Joe Brinson was sixteen, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana, the setting for this harrowing, transfixing novel by the acclaimed author of Rock Springs. Filled with an abiding sense of love and family, and of the forces that test them to the breaking point, Wildlife—first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1990 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback—is a book whose spare poetry and expansive vision established it as an American classic.

Vintage Books

A Multitude of Sins

Literary

HarperAudio

Dust jacket notes: "Some novels create a world as enclosed as a terrarium. A Piece of My Heart ranges wide in its landscapes, human and geographic, yet the heart is broken into pieces by repeated and obsessive sequences - by violence, by cruelty, by sexual love coupling with hatred, and by purposeless random accident. Richard Ford tells the violent, comic, and deeply moving story of two men, one pursuing a woman, the other pursuing himself. Robard and Sam meet in a bizarre household on an island hideaway in the Mississippi. Their original intentions in going to the island are quickly obscured by the world of purposelessness they have entered, and are ultimately sacrificed in the explosive finale. This Southern landscape flowers with victims, like the deer swimming to shore suddenly sucked under and drowned by an enormous fish. The novel opens with a mysterious murder; who has been shot is not known. In this drama the victims are predators, the predators victims. The finest of the many fascinating characters in the book, a man of fierceness, of ancient purpose, a survivor and predator - becomes his own last victim. A Piece of My Heart is grim, phobic, nightmarish, and almost intolerable; it is redeemed by its own extremity. The pieces of these hearts share a vitality and an intensity greater than any new author has brought to fiction for decades. Character after character is particular, special, different, located, and exact. Place and scene, action and image and smell, dialogue above all - in this novel the texture of the lived life is urgent, breathes through each word, reproduces itself like a permanent after-image on the reader's imagination. And last - therefore maybe first - through all its blackness, this hazardous, doomed vision is profoundly comic. Richard Ford is the darkest, the funniest, and the best new American novelist."

Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

"First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later.”
So begins Canada, the unforgettable story of a boy attempting to find grace, written by the only writer in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award for a single novel. 
This is the story of Dell Parsons, whose parents rob a bank and fracture his life into a before and an after, crossing the threshold that cannot be uncrossed. After his parents’ arrest and imprisonment, Del and Berner, his twin sister, face a blank future of foster care and social services visits. Berner, willful and burning with anger, runs away – orphaning Del completely. 
In the midst of his abandonment, a family friend intervenes, spiriting Del across the Montana/Saskatchewan border. There, in a dilapidated town floating in the sea of the Canadian prairie, he’s taken in by Arthur Remlinger – an enigmatic, charismatic man whose own past exists on the other side of a similarly uncrossable border. 
Undone by the calamity of his parents’ robbery, Del struggles under the vastness of the prairie sky and the stark, unforgiving landscape to realign his sense of self and his perception of the parents he thought he knew, even as he moves on an inexorable collision course with the slow-simmering violence trembling just beneath Arthur Remlinger’s cool reserve.
A resonant and luminous masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision, CANADA is an elemental novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost, and of the mysterious and powerful bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose but rich with emotional clarity, lyrical precision, and an acute sense of the grandeur of living, it is a masterpiece from one of the greatest American writers alive.

Canada

United States

Ecco

The only writer ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award for a single novel (Independence Day) Richard Ford follows the completion of his acclaimed Bascombe trilogy with Canada. After a five-year hiatus, an undisputed American master delivers a haunting and elemental novel about the cataclysm that undoes one teenage boy’s family, and the stark and unforgiving landscape in which he attempts to find grace.
A powerful and unforgettable tale of the violence lurking at the heart of the world, Richard Ford’s Canada will resonate long and loud for readers of stark and sweeping novels of American life, from the novels of Cheever and Carver to the works of Philip Roth, Charles Frazier, Richard Russo, and Jonathan Franzen.

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Books by FORD, RICHARD

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by FORD, RICHARD. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wildlife

WILDLIFE.

A Piece of My Heart

Rock Springs

THE SPORTSWRITER.

Wildlife

A Multitude of Sins

A Piece of My Heart

Canada

Canada