The Shadow Year - by Jeffrey Ford (Paperback)

From the Back Cover

On New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy spends much of his free time in the basement of his family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with figurines representing friends and neighbors. Their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her siblings, moves around the inanimate clay residents.

There is a strangeness in the air as disappearances, deaths, spectral sightings, and the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car mark this unforgettable shadow year. But strangest of all is the inescapable fact that all these troubling occurrences directly cor-respond to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in their basement.

Review Quotes

"Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too. For those of you--and you know who you are--who think the indispensable element for good genre fiction is good writing, this is not to be missed." - Kirkus Review, Starred

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

"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

"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