The Lay of the Land

ALSO BY RICHARD FORD

A Multitude of Sins

Women with Men

Independence Day

Wildlife

Rock Springs

The Sportswriter

The Ultimate Good Luck

A Piece of My Heart

The Lay of the Land

The Lay

of the Land

O

by Richard Ford

Alfred A. Knopf ∙ New York ∙ Toronto ∙ 2006

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Ford

All rights reserved. Published in the United States

by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada,

a division of Random House of Canada Limited Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

www.randomhouse.ca

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon

are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Portions of this novel previously appeared in slightly different form in The New Yorker.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Swallow Press/Ohio University Press: Excerpt from "To What Strangers, What Welcome" by J. V. Cunningham, from The Poems of J. V. Cunningham.

Copyright © 1997 by J. V. Cunningham. Reprinted by permission of Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio (wvw.ohioswallow.com).

Doubleday: Excerpt from "The Waking" from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1953 by Theodore Roethke. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ford, Richard, date.

The lay of the land / by Richard Ford. —1st ed.

p. cm

ISBN-10: 0-679-45468-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-679-45468-7

1. Real estate agents—Fiction. 2. New Jersey—Fiction.