Canada

"First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later.”

So begins Canada, the unforgettable story of a boy attempting to find grace, written by the only writer in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award for a single novel.   

This is the story of Dell Parsons, whose parents rob a bank and fracture his life into a before and an after, crossing the threshold that cannot be uncrossed.  After his parents’ arrest and imprisonment, Del and Berner, his twin sister, face a blank future of foster care and social services visits. Berner, willful and burning with anger, runs away – orphaning Del completely.

In the midst of his abandonment, a family friend intervenes, spiriting Del across the Montana/Saskatchewan border. There, in a dilapidated town floating in the sea of the Canadian prairie, he’s taken in by Arthur Remlinger – an enigmatic, charismatic man whose own past exists on the other side of a similarly uncrossable border. 

Undone by the calamity of his parents’ robbery, Del struggles under the vastness of the prairie sky and the stark, unforgiving landscape to realign his sense of self and his perception of the parents he thought he knew, even as he moves on an inexorable collision course with the slow-simmering violence trembling just beneath Arthur Remlinger’s cool reserve.

A resonant and luminous masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision, CANADA is an elemental novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost, and of the mysterious and powerful bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose but rich with emotional clarity, lyrical precision, and an acute sense of the grandeur of living, it is a masterpiece from one of the greatest American writers alive.

When fifteen-year-old Del Parsons' parents rob a North Dakota bank, his normal life is altered forever, and a threshold is crossed that can never be uncrossed. His parents' imprisonment threatens a turbulent and uncertain future for Del and his twin sister, Berner. Fierce with resentment, Berner flees their Montana home for California. But Del is not completely abandoned. A family friend spirits him across the Canadian border toward safety and a better life. There, afloat on the Saskatchewan prairie, Del finds only cold refuge from Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and alluring American fugitive with a dark and violent past.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery, Del struggles to remake himself. But his search for grace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with the forces of darkness that shadow us all.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.

“This is a brilliant and engrossing portrait of a fragile American family and the fragile consciousness of a teenage boy. It is also fascinating in the way it reveals the plot in the opening page and then winds backwards, offering a more and more intimate version of the story.” - Colm Toibin

“Robust and powerful… Ford is able to tap into something momentous and elemental about the profound moral chaos behind the actions of seemingly responsible people… Ford has dramatized the frightening discovery of the world’s anarchic heart.” - Wall Street Journal

“Richard Ford returns with one of his most powerful novels yet…Ford has never written better…Canada is Richard Ford’s best book since Independence Day, and despite its robbery and killings it too depends on its voice, a voice oddly calm and marked by the spare grandeur of its landscape.” - Daily Beast

“Told in Ford’s exquisitely detailed, unhurried prose…Ford is interested here in the ways snap decisions can bend life in unexpected directions... Canada’s characters grapple with this... and the answers they come up with define the rest of their lives, along with this quietly thoughtful book.” - Entertainment Weekly

“A triumph of voice.... The writing... is spare, but heartbreaking.” - USA Today

“Mr. Ford has fashioned an engaging, ruminative voice for Dell…capable of capturing the vernacular of everyday, while addressing the big philosophical questions of choice and fate. It’s a voice capable of conjuring both the soporific routines of daily life in 1960 in Great Falls, before Dell’s parents turn to crime, and the harrowing, Dickensian experiences he is subjected to after their arrest… Mr. Ford does a masterly job of turning the implausible into the inexorable…” - New York Times

“Willa Cather once wrote that ‘a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.’ By that measure, and any other, Richard Ford is doing his very best in his extraordinary new novel… and he’s doing it with a level of linguistic mastery that is rivaled by few, if any, in American letters today…Canada is a tale of what happens when we cross certain lines and can never go back. It is an examination of the redemptive power of articulated memory, and it is a masterwork by one of our finest writers working at the top of his form.” - Andre Dubus III, New York Times Book Review

“With Canada, Ford has trumped himself, winning critical raves for the rarest of literary commodities: a grippingly told popular novel that rewards serious, grown-up attention… In its 420 pages, Canada follows the lingering, adult consequences of crime. It bears down on moral and emotional questions. It displays Ford’s uncanny power to suggest a place, (the treeless borderland of Saskatchewan and Montana) and to create believable characters whose extreme acts test their souls, but never test a reader’s sense of plausibility.” - New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Awe-inspiring… The laconic, grief-stricken voice of Dell, looking back on his past, trying to make some kind sense of what happened when his family imploded, keeps you turning pages, as do the quiet, thought-provoking revelations that Ford drops in throughout.” - O, the Oprah Magazine

“[Ford’s] newest novel Canada, shows an artist in full command of his craft—sparsely elegant and bracingly direct, with a refreshing lack of irony or tricks.” - Men’s Journal

“[Canada]confirms his position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America… his most elegiac and profound book…” - Washington Post

“Pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation.” - The New Yorker

“A must-read. . . . Canada reminds us why Ford is considered one of this country’s most distinguished writers.” - St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Masterly… in Ford’s American tragedy, filled with lost innocence and inevitable violence—a rusting carnival, a rabbit caught in a coyote’s jaws—geography feels a lot like fate.” - Vogue

“Ford really excels…in his virtuoso command of narrative suspense. He makes us wait....Ford is deliberately playing with his reader, almost showing off: look how much I can divulge, spin out, or hold back and still keep you hooked. Some readers may be irritated by this technique as overly contrived; most, however, will find it dexterous and artful. Whichever the case, Ford leaves us in no doubt about his iron grip on his book’s pace and rhythm . . . “Each part of Canada is superb in its own way. . . . A serious artist, Ford is regularly willing to risk sounding earnest or even portentous. While his fiction invariably delivers a lot of pleasure, it’s clear that he’s not just writing for fun.” - New York Review of Books

“One of the most memorably heartbreaking novels of the year.” - Christian Science Monitor

“From landscapes to motivations, all things are described in great, often beautiful, detail.” - Newark Star Ledger

“Ford excels on a canvas that lends itself to sparse, weighted dialogue and observation…Winsome, complex and gritty, Dell represents the quintessential voice of one of the best American novelists of our time. Canada is Ford’s first appearance on the new-book shelf in six years. In every way, it was worth the wait.” - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[A] deeply felt and magnificently imagined work…With Canada, Ford has given us his deepest exploration yet of weakness and betrayal set amid a boy’s coming of age. It is a memorable novel, suffused with love, sorrow and regret.” - Austin American-Statesman

“[A] novel about big truths told by a writer with clear vision…solid, satisfying craftsmanship. This is a Richard Ford novel in the tradition of his earlier work. It also is a coming-of-age story, and a story about the discovery of identity.” - Washington Independent Review of Books

“Marvelous…Canada is a masterpiece of a story with rich language and dialogue filled with suspense, bleakness, human frailties and flaws, and a little bit of hope seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy whose emotions seem often aligned with the desolate landscape of its setting.” - The Oregonian (Portland)