Be Mine

‘A literary project matched in ambition only by John Updike’s Rabbit series … The greatest ambition of all is that Ford has decided to make this grim material into a bright comedy, and has succeeded’ * Financial Times *
‘Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe series - stands as one of the finest achievements of modern American fiction. Frank’s story comes to a fittingly mordant and brilliant conclusion in Be Mine … a joyful reminder that close attention to lived life is both renewing and affirming’ * The Independent *

‘While the portrayal of a father-son bond torqued by the burden of illness is desperately moving,
the snap and crunch of Ford’s finely hewn prose remains an endless pleasure’

* Daily Mail *
‘A funny book, with Frank and Paul’s dialogue – decades of love contained within – reading at times like a comedy double act’ * Irish Times *
‘Wounding and hilarious …The quality of Ford’s prose leaves the reader breathless; there are sentences and paragraphs here you could read and re-read without ever tiring of doing so’ * Business Post *
‘The laureate of the American middle-class middle man … Great’ * Telegraph *
‘Few writers have captured contemporary American life as incisively as Richard Ford … Bascombe is a memorable literary creation – one of the most complicated and unique characters of our age – and these first-person novels, so resonant in setting and so strong in plot, are full of pathos, as well as being nuanced, wickedly funny depictions of contemporary American life' * Independent *
'Ford’s world is contingent, frightening, beautiful, comically manifold' * Guardian *
'Frank is heroic in his own quotidian way. He holds himself together the way you and I hold ourselves together (or try to): by snatching at straws in the maelstrom of everyday life. That’s the power of the Bascombe novels. Ford creates a reading experience that feels truer than your own experience … Think of Be Mine as a chance to spend a last few hours with a friend' * The Times *
‘Ford is a master of first-person narratives in which there is space for philosophical reflection as well as telling human detail’ * Mail on Sunday *
‘Comic elegy … A picaresque record of American boomerdom … Wonderful’ * Novel of the Month, The Oldie *

Praise for Richard Ford:

'A masterful writer'

* Raymond Carver *
'Ford writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight' * Observer *
'A marvellous writer' * John Banville *
'I can't think of many other writers, living or dead, who have given me so many reasons over the years to slow down on the page and pay attention' * Times Literary Supplement *
'An American master' * Daily Telegraph *