FORD, Richard. The Frank Bascombe Novels: The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, Let Me Be Frank With You, Be Mine. London: Collins Harvill, The Harvill Press, Bloomsbury. 1986-2023.
8vo. Five volumes in original cloth and dustwrappers; pp. 381, [3]; [6], 451, [7]; [6], 485, [5]; [10], 240, [6]; [6], 342, [4]; A near fine to fine set showing the lightest of shelfwear, the wrappers unclipped and unfaded, the bindings square and firm, the contents clean throughout; Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Be Mine signed by Richard Ford without dedication to title pages.
A complete run of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels; first UK editions and printings, three of the five volumes are signed by the author.
A natural, and worthy, heir to Updike's great Rabbit Angstrom novels, Ford’s sequence follows another American Everyman, “a more nearly complete and present man than many who actually walk the earth” (Claire Messud, New York Review of Books), who we first meet as a divorced 38-year-old with children (his eldest son has died), a girlfriend, and a job he enjoys a sportswriter. By the time we get to the Be Mine, forty-seven years later, he is an old man caring for his sick son.
One of the great achievements of US fiction of the last half-century, the novels, by telling one man’s story, offer a luminous chronicle of late twentieth and early twenty-first century suburban America.
SKU: 2123784