Snapper

(Paperback)

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Description

With wry humour and real freshness, SNAPPER charts the disastrous love affair between career birdwatcher Nathan Lochmueller and the place that made him.

Set in a brilliantly observed rural Indiana, 'the bastard son of the Midwest', SNAPPER is a book about birdwatching, a woman who won't stay true, and a pick-up truck that won't start. Here turtles eat alligators for breakfast, Klansmen skulk in the undergrowth, and truckers drop into the diner of a town named Santa Claus to ensure that no child's Christmas letter goes unanswered, while Nathan grapples with the eternal question: should I stay, or should I go Kimberling's vision of small-town life is as characterful as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, but bristling with the tensions of race, class, poverty and prejudice, it makes for a bracing read.

Reviews

Superb... always engaging, sometimes beautiful and often funny' - Telegraph

Captivating... Snapper could do for birdwatchers what Annie Proulx did for small-town newspaper reporters and cowboys - Independent on Sunday

Funny and adroit fiction - Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

Delightfully entertaining - Esquire

Brilliant... an absolute joy of a book. I predict big things for it - Scott Pack, Me and My Big Mouth

Brimming with unusual characters and hilarious idisoyncracies... Kimberling shows much promise - Shortlist

Fascinating and captivating - Washington Post

Funny and absorbing' - Booklist

Author Bio

Brian Kimberling is a native of Indiana and a graduate of Indiana University. In the mid-nineties he was a research assistant for a major study of Indiana songbirds, an experience central to his first book. Since then he has lived and worked 'mostly as a TEFL teacher' in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Turkey and England, where he lives now. He began writing his first book on the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA in 2009, and was awarded the first annual Janklow & Nesbit Prize for the best manuscript to emerge from the course. He lives in Bath with his wife and son.