The Shadow Year - Softcover

"Think Ray Bradbury's Green Town stories, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Stephen King's The Body (made into the film Stand by Me) and you get an idea of the tone of Ford's latest fine work. Grade: A"--Rocky Mountain News

"Jeffrey Ford's latest triumph, THE SHADOW YEAR, is as haunting as it is humorous...readers will recognize real talent in Ford's vivid, unerring voice."--Louisville Courier Journal on THE SHADOW YEAR

"Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen."--Jonathan Carroll, author of The Wooden Sea

"Superb, heartbreaking, and masterfully written . . . It's proof of Jeffrey Ford's narrative power that, ultimately, the distinction [between real and invented] doesn't much matter. His made-up world trumps ours."--Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

"Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford."--Boston Globe on THE SHADOW YEAR

"We should be grateful that alongside the firm of Updike, Cheever, Ford & Company there exists, in both fiction and film, an American tradition that depicts the suburbs as places of wonder rather than stultification, discovery rather than predictability."--New York Newsday

"The Shadow Year captures the totality of a lived period, its actualities and its dreams, its mundane essentials and its odd subjective imperatives; it is a work of episodic beauty and mercurial significance."--Nick Gevers, Locus

"Surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue."--Booklist

"Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In the wake of a classmate's disappearance, a sixth grader and his older brother begin observing strange events in their 1960s small-town suburb, including the appearance of a man in a large white car, the night activities of a peeping tom, and the deteriorating mental state of the school librarian. Reprint.