By the internationally renowned winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Published to coincide with Richard Ford's debut hardback for Bloomsbury, The Lay of the Land

In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter, an unhappy girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. "Rock Springs" is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiselled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.