A brilliant debut collection of stories set in the American Deep South, by a distinctive and award-winning new voice.

Poachers reads as if Raymond Carver were still alive and living in the profoundly Deep South. Or imagine a world created by Cormac McCarthy and plunk it down in the woods of southern Alabama, where emotions run as raw as moonshine.

In ten spare, muscular stories, Tom Franklin evokes a world of forests and swamps, hunting and fishing, and fills it with poachers, drunks and poor white trash. He creates haunting tales about people who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can't escape, people like the three half-wild brothers in the award-winning title story, who treat the swamp as their kingdom and hunt down anything that crosses their path - until they themselves become the prey.

About the Author

Tom Franklin was born and raised in south Alabama, where he worked as a heavy-equipment operator in a grit factory, a construction inspector in a chemical plant and a clerk in a hospital morgue. He now teaches fiction writing at the University of South Alabama.

Poachers is his first collection. He is now at work on a novel, Hell at the Breech, also to be published by Flamingo.

'Unforgettable . . . Poachers is like a hand that comes out of the green swamp on a moonless night and pulls you from the canoe. What Poachers is really about is discovering a new writer who reminds you that you love to read.' Tampa Tribune

Reviews

'It's as if the author kidnapped Raymond Carver's characters and set them loose in the Deep South.'
New York Times Book Review

'I am amazed by [Franklin's] power. I'm reminded, by the evocative strength of the prose and the relentlessness of the imagination, of Faulkner. Franklin is a vivid portraitist of these harsh human types, and his authority in depicting the natural world "along this stretch of the Alabama River" is dazzling. I can't believe he's not better known, but he will be, and soon.'
PHILIP ROTH

'This is as strong a collection as any I've read in recent years. The stories are collectively and individually brilliant, imbued with a high sense of Southern Gothic and a dark sense of humour.'
Chicago Tribune

Book Information
ISBN 9780006552260
Author Tom Franklin
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Flamingo
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Weight(grams) 149g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 14mm