IN THE AYRSHIRE of Andrew O’Hagan’s third novel there are no happy people, not one. This is a non-trivial detail: the absence of all happiness is peculiar. The locals staring into the shifting Irish Sea, with no Tolstoyan means of support, are meanwhile unhappy in a peculiar way. God or an author...

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on February 16, 1944. He was an only child, the son of a travelling salesman who died from a heart attack when Ford was sixteen. Despite suffering a mild form of dyslexia, he went on to study at Michigan State University, where he met Kristina Hensley,...

I COME from a family of immigrants, though I never thought of us that way until I became an immigrant myself. My father’s ancestors migrated to the Philippines from Madrid, taking the name Muñoz with them. My mother’s grandfather was from Taiwan. As legend goes, the family name was Tan but after...