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.
Brian Kimberling was born and grew up in Indiana, where he was briefly employed as an ornithologist, a job that inspired his first book, SNAPPER. Before settling in the UK, he lived and worked in Prague, and drew on extensive experience teaching English in bars to create the character of Elliott in GOULASH. He now lives and works in Bath.