Description

‘The god of small stories … A set of polished gems from a master craftsman’ Sunday Times
‘An American master’ Daily Telegraph

A woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick’s Day parade goes by. A group of friends, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in, the air thick with the scent of gin and popcorn and longing.

A visionary collection of luminous stories, imprinting landscape, and great moments in small lives – and of the people we carry with us long after they are gone – Sorry For Your Trouble reconfirms Richard Ford as the master of contemporary American fiction.

‘He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight and, while he never mocks his characters, is keenly aware of the absurdity involved in being alive … Exemplary in its nuanced understanding of the relationships between men and women’ Observer

Publisher Review

Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence ... One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald ... Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked * New York Times Book Review * 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 * The god of small stories ... A set of polished gems from a master craftsman ... The prose is terse, the craftsmanship, as always, fine. The reader feels cradled in the capable hands of an expert * Sunday Times * One of the great masters of American literature -- Andrew Marr, BBC Radio 4 'Start the Week' He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight and, while he never mocks his characters, is keenly aware of the absurdity involved in being alive ... Sorry for Your Trouble , is exemplary in its nuanced understanding of the relationships between men and women * Observer * Finely crafted * Mail on Sunday * American master * Daily Telegraph * Late style, in Ford, is loose-limbed, allusive, jokey in a rueful way, and mutedly elegiac ... A marvellous writer -- John Banville * Guardian * As you read Richard Ford, the harder you look, the sadder and funnier it gets * Observer * Work of understated power, intelligence and not a little mischief, but one that leaves one wanting - craving - more * Independent * The incomparable Mississippian Richard Ford is a great writer, no question about that. More importantly, he is a great American writer. Throughout his novels and short stories, as well as his astute critical reading of literature, he has fulfilled the main objective of art: the exploration of the self. He has also consistently chiselled away, ever closer to the heart of the United States ... He is a writer who has nailed exactly what it is to be alive - no mean feat - and to be alive in the US -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * His journalistic eye for the revealing detail, his knack for tracing the connections between the public and the personal, his gift for capturing the precariousness of daily life * The Times *