In Sorry for Your Trouble, a collection of short stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford offers a moving meditation on memory, love, and loss. From a 16-year-old fatherless boy in “Displaced” to the fiftysomething widower suddenly navigating life alone and untethered in “The Run of Yourself,” Ford’s protagonists are all mourning, both the people who are no longer there and the lives they no longer have – or perhaps never did. Joining him is iconic Irish novelist John Banville discussing his latest work, Snow, a dark thriller that kicks off with the murder – and castration – of a Catholic priest in a country manor.
In Conversation: On Sorry for Your Trouble & Snow
In Conversation: On Sorry for Your Trouble & Snow
Author:
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John Banville
John Banville is the author of 16 previous novels including The Infinities, The Book of Evidence, and The Sea for which he won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2015, he also won the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In Snow (Hanover Square Press) a parish priest is found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family, and detective Inspector St. John Strafford is summoned to investigate. The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford — flinty, Protestant and determined to identify the murderer — faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate. As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threaten to obliterate everything. The New York Times praised Snow noting that “Time and again, Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format he seems to be aping. Everything that seems creakingly familiar about the country-house murder turns out to be darker and darker still.”
Richard Ford
Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day. He is winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Prix Femina in France, the 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Canada. His story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank with You, Rock Springs, and A Multitude of Sins. The stories in Ford’s collection Sorry For your Trouble (Ecco) take us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant (“Displaced”); then bring us along as an American woman takes a late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life (“Driving Up”). “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them. Sorry for Your Trouble is a moving meditation on memory, love and loss. The Wall Street Journal noted that “In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision, what Emerson in his scholarly address failed to mention, the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.”
