It is fall, 2000 - and in every household and bar across the USA the likely outcome of the hijacked presidential election is being hotly debated. Frank Bascombe, fifty-five, settled in his realty business in Sea-Clift, New Jersey, has arrived at a state of optimistic pragmatism that he calls the Permanent Period of life. Epic mistakes have already been made, dreams downsized, and Frank reflects that now at least there are fewer opportunities left in life to get things wrong.

But the tranquility he had anticipated is not to be. Who could have guessed that this second wife, Sally, would walk out on their apparently happy marriage ? Or that, after all these years, he might be spending Thanksgiving dinner with first wife Ann and their two children ? That Ann might still, after all, feel for him what he has never quite stopped feeling for her ? Life in the Permanent Period proves as ambivalent, precarious and full of possibility as life had ever been.

In his third Frank Bascombe novel, after the bestselling The Sportswriter and Independance Day, Richard Ford contemplates the human character with wry precision and in luminous prose. Graceful, expansive, filled with pathos but irresistibly funny, The Lay of the Land is a modern America masterpiece.
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