Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novel, Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award. In Let Me Frank With You, Ford revisits his best-known character in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
“In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity, “ publishers HarperCollins declare about the novel which will appear in November.
“It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.”
Ford’s first two novels books sold poorly. The Jackson, Mississippi-born author had retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine, Inside Sports.
"I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers, “ the author said of that period in his life. “I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep."
Then came the first of the Frank Bascombe books, The Sportswriter, first published in 1986, Ford’s “break-out” book. It was named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The novel introduced the 70-year old writer to a much wider public at home in the USA and to an adulatory international reading public also. The Sportswriter concerns a failed novelist turned sportswriter who suffers a profound crisis following the death of his son. Another Frank Bascombe novel, Independence Day followed in 1995 and a third, The Lay of the Land, in 2006. His most recent novel is the widely-acclaimed Canada.
In 2008 Ford - a regular visitor to Ireland - served as an Adjunct Professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin.
