Canada

As Philip Larkin wrote, 'they f**k you up, your mum and dad'. In the case of Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford's seventh novel, Canada, it's not some subtle and unconscious process but the fact that on an impulse his parents decided to rob a bank when he was 15. The murders, we are told, came later. As if they are barely of consequence.

Ford explains this all in the first sentence of Canadaand it acts like a rock thrown into a pond; the rest of this big novel is really not concerned with the rock. The rest of the book is a close description of the wave that it sends out. The impact it has on Dell and his twin sister as individuals as well as what it does to the idea of them as a family.

Because of this concentration on the wave rather than the moment of the impact Canadais a real slow train of a novel: stopping everywhere, and gaining a steady momentum and a powerful sense of purpose. In Dell Parsons, Ford presents a calmly, almost eerily distant narrator for the journey.

By the end of Canada there is a sense that Dell has embedded this distance and, in many ways 'moved on'. But there is never a doubt that he will live with the effects of that insane act of his parents. And that your parents may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.