A vast, magnificent canvas. This is one of the first great novels of the 21st century -- John Banville * Sunday Telegraph *
Astonishing ... Reviewers will be quick to proclaim that Richard Ford has written a great American novel, another masterpiece, and he most emphatically has. Canada is his finest work to date ... A powerfully human and profound novel that makes one sigh, shudder and weep. Here is greatness. No doubt about it * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times *
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, New Yorker *
The emotional power of Richard Ford's Canada arises from a sense of grief and loss embedded in the writing, and the imaginative sweep of the book, which enters the spirit of a sensitive, vulnerable and intelligent teenage boy and by implication enters the spirit of America itself -- Colm Toibin * Guardian, Books of the Year *
By far the novel of the year: everything that can be good and great and true in fiction is expressed with an unnervingly eloquent humanity in this devastating masterwork ... Ford's art draws its strength from his relaxed, rhythmic prose and his astute observations of human nature * Irish Times Book of the Year *
I like the weight and the heft of Canada by Richard Ford. It is written with a quiet, hypnotic brilliance that almost had me weeping with envy. I particularly like the opening lines, which take you by the throat and drag you through the narrative -- Sue Townsend * Guardian, Books of the Year *
His most elegiac and profound book yet ... Marilynne Robinson (without the theology) and Cormac McCarthy (without the gore) * Washington Post *
One of the wonderful things about Richard Ford is that he can make people who do outlandish things, such as rob banks, seem almost normal ... Ford is superb at suspense ... This is a book about dysfunctional lives in a North America that existed half a century ago - it sometimes has the feel of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. What a backdrop - you feel as if anything might happen here ... This is a story about adolescence, about crime, about broken families, and about trying to escape. It's very engaging, and in the end, quite sad * William Leith, Evening Standard *
A real king returns ... a story, and a vision, as sweeping as its landscapes * Boyd Tonkin, Independent *
His books will save you * GQ *
A scrupulously rendered coming-of-age story * Anthony Cummins, Sunday Telegraph *
The strength of the book is Ford's examination of flawed fatherhood, of the failures that push Dell into an uneasy maturity, one that allows him to achieve what remains the modest but profound goal of Ford's fiction: simply, to make a life ... his coda is as precise and measured as anything he has conjured before. The end, like a piece of origami, could fold right into the beginning of Ford's greatest novel, The Sportswriter. The sombre and gorgeous final two thirds of Canada rest next to Ford's best fiction * Craig Taylor, The Times *
A true master of the modern American novel * Independent *
Exceptional American novel ... Breathtaking ... its unique shape disconcerts and enchants the reader equally -- Phillip Hensher * Spectator *
Richard Ford's arresting new novel is - on one level - an intriguing variation on this American Childhood Gets Derailed theme ... as this highly original voice begins to take hold, you find yourself drawn into Ford's uneasy, ever-skewed, narrative world. It's a world which speaks volumes about the reclusiveness and violence at the heart of the American experience - which, like the solitary terrain, engulfs those who try to find a sense of self or meaning amid its hard-scrabble vacuity. Audacious in its narrative technique (observes Ford's frequent use of short chapters, his varied pacing, the way he never rushes any plot points, and allows the story to unfold in its own enigmatic way), Canada both grips and haunts * Douglas Kennedy, Independent *
As opening lines go, they're corkers. The rest of the novel is quieter than you'd imagine but it amply fulfils their promise ... The result is prose so sonorous in its melancholy insightfulness that you'll want to linger over each sentence. Meanwhile, the story itself - a tale of what happens when uncrossable lines are crossed - will have you turning its pages ever faster * Daily Mail *
Although its subjects are disarray and bewilderment, there is barely a dishevelled sentence in this awesomely calm book ... Canada is soaked in a subtle sadness, then, born of the foreknowledge of error and loss, and reading it isn't always easy. But we persist despite ourselves, because of the beckoning fluency of Ford's prose and the painful sharpness of his insights ... Ford has always been a clarifier, slowly making lucid the lines of the everyday. Canada is perhaps his most transparent novel yet: shorn of tricks, sparse and expansive as the plains on which it is set ... By looking straight at things, Ford has written another novel about the fine lines that separate the humdrum and the calamitous, and about those schisms of existence that can be anticipated only in retrospect * Sunday Times *
***** A superb stand-alone novel from Richard Ford * Metro *
Ford really excels in his virtuoso command of narrative suspense ... each part of Canada is superb in its own way ... [Ford is] a serious artist * New York Review of Books *
The most fulfilling read of the year * Guardian Readers' Books of the Year *
