Between Them - Softcover

Ford, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408884712 ISBN 13: 9781408884713

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a deeply personal account of his parents - an intimate portrait of American mid-twentieth century life, and a celebration of family love

Edna Akin and Parker Ford married young. For fifteen years they traveled the American south of the 1930s as Parker went about his work as a traveling salesman, selling laundry starch. Life was hotels rooms, roadside bars and always each other. Then a single child was born to them, and a life went a new way.

Blending his parents' lives, drawing on memory, history, anecdote, Richard Ford's Between Them is a stirring contemplation of love's mystery and of loss.

About this title

Review:

An extraordinary piece of writing ... The act of writing those loves, has been if anything, Ford suggests, less poignant for him than a "source of immense exhilaration". His readers, those with parents, and those without them, will feel that too (Observer)

Full of gentle humour and a sense of lives lived well ... His great affection for his parents is everywhere evident ... In this superbly written account, Ford pieces together fragments of their lives, and brings them wonderfully to life (Sunday Times)

The US novelist and short story writer offers a touching recollection that is also a vivid portrait of mid-20th-century American life (Guardian 2017-01-07)

One of America's most gifted human anthropologists ... Their manners and affections, pleasures and frustrations take on weight through unsentimental but tender renderings ... So what are we left with in the end ...through ellipses, expressions of love, and the very fact of his biographical endeavour, is a testament to the art of writing (Big Issue in Scotland)

An exercise in love and economy ... Colourful, thoughtful and restrained, it points to all the gaps in parents' lives that children know nothing of, and never think to ask. Ostensibly spartan, Between Them is almost as rich in what you are left to read between the lines as in what is actually set in print (Sunday Herald, Books of the Year)

Through anecdotes and the odd photograph, he builds a portrait of mid-century America (Cultural calendar for the months ahead Daily Telegraph 2017-04-01)

Stylish, elegiac and funny . A marvellous writer (John Banville)

The enjoyment of reading Richard Ford is about the exquisite pleasure of acquisition of language . The harder you look, the sadder and funnier it gets (Observer)

Ford is possessed of a writer's greatest gifts ... Pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation ... Ford's language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within (Lorrie Moore)

A true master of the modern American novel (Independent)

Book Description:

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a deeply personal account of his parents - an intimate portrait of American mid-twentieth century life, and a celebration of family love

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1408884712
• ISBN 13: 9781408884713
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192