Between Them

Magical ... An extraordinary piece of writing * Observer * Imaginatively generous, striking in its eloquence * Daily Telegraph * A master at the comedy and tragedies of family life * Independent * Serious, contemplative, reluctant to make grand claims, determined to be as accurate as possible and desperate to preserve two lives that might otherwise go unnoticed ... it's his unembarrassed love for his parents that comes through. Here he is, in his 70s, long after their deaths, still living between them -- Blake Morrison * Guardian * Ford has given us a moving, and strangely disturbing, book -- John Sutherland * Financial Times * Full of gentle humour and a sense of lives lived well ... In this superbly written account, Ford pieces together fragments of their lives, and brings them wonderfully to life * Sunday Times * Shows how the little details of ordinary lives are as charged with drama as any epic * Daily Mail * The US novelist and short story writer offers a touching recollection that is also a vivid portrait of mid-20th-century American life * Guardian * A brilliant, affecting meditation on filial love and loss ... Rendered, as ever, in the stoic Southern cadences of Ford's prose * Times Literary Supplement * Time and again in his novels and short stories Mississippi-born Richard Ford has expressed intense, often profound emotions through wry humour in prose of daunting elegance ... Ford has consistently proved to be not only a great writer, but also the voice of contemporary (if pre-Trumpian) America: funny, human, sad and real. There is a jaunty, insightful wisdom about Ford's work. It is witty and wry, replete with ironic sighs. He misses very little about his fellow man, always detecting the faults yet never ignoring the vulnerability * Irish Times * The Pulitzer Prize winner has continued to turn out clear-sighted, character-driven portraits of ordinary Americans with an emotional heft and social savvy matched only by a handful of masterful contemporaries such as John Updike, Alice Munro and his old pal Raymond Carver ... Vivid, empathetic and elegiac, they're instantly affecting, and as unmistakably American, as an Edward Hopper painting or a Tom Waits ballad ... At seventy-three years old, Ford is still one of the best we have * Big Issue * Beautifully written, it evokes mid-twentieth-century America like an Edward Hopper painting * Radio Times * A spare, honest, beautiful book that's a must for fans of its subjects' Pulitzer Prize-winning son * GQ * A remarkable book, moving and grave ... It hits with the power of a not-quite-glimpsed truth ... A memoir beyond praise * The Australian * Stylish, elegiac and funny ... A marvellous writer -- John Banville The enjoyment of reading Richard Ford is about the exquisite pleasure of acquisition of language ... The harder you look, the sadder and funnier it gets * Observer * Ford is possessed of a writer's greatest gifts ... Pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation ... Ford's language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within -- Lorrie Moore A true master of the modern American novel * Independent * A richly textured, rolling and poetic voice * The Times * What is depicted is exactly what is seen, a peculiar miracle of transcription and feeling ... The superb sense of life, of observation and feeling, enacted on every page -- Philip Hensher Ford makes you ponder so deeply the way that none of us can fathom life's inherent strangeness -- Douglas Kennedy As a narrator of apparently inconsequential lives, he never assumes the rights of a novelist to know what's beneath the surface ... His observations are so acute that this brief book is worth dozens of longer ones by writers who notice less * Daily Telegraph * In the much anticipated memoir, the author of The Sportswriter pays tribute to his parents * Irish Times 'Books to Look Out for in 2017' * Ford's short memoir about his parents ... is imaginatively generous, striking in its eloquence, and rare for its lack of narcissism. Though very different from Ford's famous Frank Bascombe novels, it is emblematic of his project there, which deals with the normal, applauseless life of us all * Daily Telegraph, Summer Reading * A remarkable book, moving and grave ... It hits with the power of a not-quite-glimpsed truth ... A memoir beyond praise * The Australian * I'll be taking Richard Ford's memoir Between Them: Remembering My Parents in my own book bag in preparation for interviewing the author at the Edinburgh book festival * Kirsty Wark, Observer * An evocative portrait * Alasdair Lees, Independent *