Canada was published by Ecco in 2012. Dell Parsons, now sixty-six, recounts the events of 1960: his parents (his father a failed Air Force officer, his mother a frustrated intellectual) rob a bank in Great Falls, Montana — an act so ill-conceived and poorly executed that they are caught within days. Dell and his twin sister Berner are suddenly parentless. Before the authorities can place them in foster care, Dell is driven across the border to Saskatchewan by a family friend and left in the care of Arthur Remlinger — a cultured American expatriate who operates a rundown hotel and who, Dell gradually discovers, is hiding in Canada because he murdered two men.
The novel’s first half — the parents’ robbery and its aftermath — is Ford’s most sustained treatment of American failure: the Parsons are not criminal by nature but desperate, bored, and foolish, and their crime (a robbery of absurd incompetence) ruins their children’s lives more than their own. The second half — Dell’s months in Saskatchewan — is a coming-of-age narrative shadowed by violence: Remlinger is charming, intelligent, and dangerous, and Dell must navigate the attentions of a killer while processing the loss of his family.
Ford’s prose is at its most deliberate and measured: long sentences that build meaning through accumulation, a narrative voice that is both precise and wondering, and a structure that moves with the inevitability of Greek tragedy toward its predetermined conclusion.
Collecting Canada
First edition (Ecco/HarperCollins, New York, 2012): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Signed: $40–$80
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
Across the Border
Canada (2012) opens with one of the great first lines in recent American fiction: “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” The novel follows fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons after his parents rob a bank in Great Falls, Montana, and he is spirited across the border to Saskatchewan, where he falls under the influence of a cultured, dangerous American exile. The Canadian landscape — vast, empty, indifferent — becomes a character in itself. The novel is Ford at his most expansive and meditative, a late-career work of quiet power.
Frequently Asked Questions
How was this received? Rapturously in Europe (it won the Prix Femina Étranger) and respectfully in the United States, though some American critics found the Canadian sections slow. It is widely regarded as Ford’s best stand-alone novel outside the Bascombe series.