BE MINE, by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
Life’s not really a journey, but it resembles one, and thus many stories of people’s lives recount journeys too. There’s Odysseus making his slow voyage back to Ithaca, Don Quixote armouring up and becoming a knight errant, Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale and Huck Finn and Jim lighting down the Mississippi. The modern embodiment of this genre is the road-trip novel, and nowhere more so than inand the bleakness of
