Celebrated for creating stories that express the shifting moods of the United States, Richard Ford is best known for his bestselling novel The Sportswriter and its 1995 sequel Independence Day—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—about famed everyman protagonist Frank Bascombe, a character who the New York Times Book Review ranks alongside "Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape." Ford’s central themes include alienation and a sense of disappointment in the American Dream, but his characters are ultimately both sympathetic and optimistic. His new novel, Canada, follows 15-year-old Dell Parsons as devastating circumstances force him to seek refuge in Saskatchewan.