LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a deeply personal account of his parents - an intimate portrait of American mid-twentieth century life, and a celebration of family love

Edna Akin and Parker Ford married young. For fifteen years they traveled the American south of the 1930s as Parker went about his work as a traveling salesman, selling laundry starch. Life was hotels rooms, roadside bars and always each other. Then a single child was born to them, and a life went a new way.

Blending his parents' lives, drawing on memory, history, anecdote, Richard Ford's Between Them is a stirring contemplation of love's mystery and of loss.