Be Mine

¿Ford¿s Frank Bascombe series stands as one of the finest achievements of modern American fiction. A fittingly mordant and brilliant conclusion¿ INDEPENDENTIn the run up to Christmas, we meet Frank Bascombe in the twilight of his days. He is a man who has occupied many colourful lives ¿ sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent ¿ but now Frank 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 faces down the mortality assured each of us, and confronts what happiness might signify at life¿s end. 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 once more our guide to the great American midway.¿A literary project matched in ambition only by John Upd