Richard Ford
Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to lifeâ€™s endless complexities than ever before. A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forgetâ€”at once hilarious, harrowing, surprising, and profound.,With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that ten years laterâ€”after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Awardâ€”was hailed by The Times of London as â€œan extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.â€ Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to lifeâ€™s endless complexities than ever before.,Frank's story resumes in the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving, permitting him to revel in the acceptance of â€œthat long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary personâ€™s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the worldâ€”if it makes note at allâ€”knows of me, how Iâ€™m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is thatâ€™s wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion.â€ But as a Presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him along with crises both marital and medical, Frank discovers that what he terms the Permanent Period is fraught with unforeseen perils: â€œAll the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies.â€,A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forgetâ€”at once hilarious, harrowing, surprising, and profound. The Lay of the Land is astonishing in its own right and a magnificent expansion of one of the most celebrated chronicles of our time.
Fiction,Novels,Literary Fiction,Literature,Literature,American,Contemporary,Audiobook,The United States Of America,Realistic Fiction,Psychology
The Lay of the Land