Author: Richard Ford
Year: 2006
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Genres/categories:
Classic
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ISBNs:
9780679454687
9780679776673
0679454683
0679776672 |
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Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to life's endless complexities than ever before. A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forget-at once hilarious, harrowing, surprising, and profound.
With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that ten years later-after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award-was hailed by The Times of London as "an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself." Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to life's endless complexities than ever before.
His 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 "that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person's; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world-if it makes note at all-knows of me, how I'm seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that's wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion." 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: "All the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies."
A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forget-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.
This book is part of the "Frank Bascombe" series. Here are some other books from this series:
 | "Independence Day"
First published in 1995
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 | "The Sportswriter"
First published in 1986
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