Canada - Tapa dura

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)

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)

His most elegiac and profound book yet ... Marilynne Robinson (without the theology) and Cormac McCarthy (without the gore) (Washington Post)

A real king returns ... a story, and a vision, as sweeping as its landscapes (Boyd Tonkin Independent)

A rather brilliant realisation of our particular voice ... a brilliant piece of work (Pat Kane on BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review)

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)