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Snapper
On sale
23rd April 2013
Price: £9.99
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.
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.
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Reviews
Superb... always engaging, sometimes beautiful and often funny'
Captivating... Snapper could do for birdwatchers what Annie Proulx did for small-town newspaper reporters and cowboys
Funny and adroit fiction
Delightfully entertaining
Brilliant... an absolute joy of a book. I predict big things for it
Brimming with unusual characters and hilarious idisoyncracies... Kimberling shows much promise
Fascinating and captivating
Funny and absorbing'
'Lyrical, comic and packed with piercing descriptions... at the same time as being down-to-earth and humorous, Snapper is suffused with a certain melancholy, and it is Kimberling's expert balancing of all these elements that allows the novel's insights - into who we are and where we come from - to hit home'
'[The] coolest of cool...a quirky and memorable debut'