To be honest, I had reservations about the appearance of this book. I'd believed that The Lay of the Land in 2006 was the last book in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, and yet here we have a fourth book, and it's short stories, and only 238 pages of widely spaced type. Hmm..how wrong I was! The 4 linked stories in this book, which almost constitute a novel, pack a very real punch. Each of them relate, in some detail, a very specific incident over a few days in the lead up to the Christmas following Hurricane Sandy's devastation of New Jersey. The stories are about commonplace things which could happen to any of us, but Frank has never been better at narrating with effortless intelligence his very particular view of the world. At times wry and funny, at times bitter and angry, at times worried and reluctant, he always has something to say that enlarges on the issue, and makes the reader think about how he or she would react in the same circumstances. These stories are compelling, the writing is economical, the subjects universal - ageing, marriage, loss, faith, real estate - and they are touching and wise. A welcome and worthy addition to the rest of Richard Ford's work.