Be Mine

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Be Mine by Richard Ford, read by Richard Poe.

A masterful writer' – RAYMOND CARVER

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is, here, once more our guide to the great American midway.

Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful lives — sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent — Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all; caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter's odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank in typical Bascombe fashion faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.

In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on display the prose, wit and intelligence that make him one of the world's most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.

‘One of the finest achievements of modern American fiction’ The Independent

Critics Review

‘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

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