The Catchers

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2025

‘Bristles with expertly calibrated menace and moral ambiguity’ —TLS

‘Elegant and eloquent’ —Daily Mail

‘A propulsive narrative that immediately grabs our interest’ —Financial Times

‘The Catchers is a delight’ —The Guardian

‘Hugely atmospheric’ —Independent

‘An evocative musical road trip’ —Observer

‘A spacious, sweeping novel’ —The Spectator

‘This incisive, sharply written novel.’ —The Sunday Times

Selected by Martin Chilton for ‘The 20 best books of the year’ —Independent

Spring 1927. The birth of popular music. John Coughlin is a song-catcher from New York who has been sent to Appalachia to source and record the local hill-country musicians. His assignment leads him to small-town Tennessee where he oversees the recording session that will establish his reputation. From here he ventures further south in search of glory. He is chasing what song-catchers call the big fish or the firefly; the song or performer which will make a man rich.

Waylaid at an old plantation house, Coughlin gets wind of a black teenage guitarist, Moss Evans, who runs bootleg liquor in the Mississippi Delta. The Mississippi has flooded, putting the country underwater, but Coughlin is able to locate the boy and bring him out. Coughlin views himself as a saviour. Others regard him as a thief and exploiter. Coughlin and Moss – the catcher and his catch – pick their way across a ruined, unstable Old South and then turn north through the mountains, heading for New York.

Praise for this Book

‘An absolutely cracking read, immersive, carefully observed and furiously written.’ —Jan Carson

Reviews of this Book

‘Books of the Month ★★★★ Brooks’s novel is hugely atmospheric, neatly capturing an era when it feels like “everything is accelerating”, and it brings to life a world of hustlers looking for the gold rush of a hit song in captivating style. The story is full of vivid, shocking characters – The Troller, Colonel Bird, the feral Grady Boys – and memorable descriptions (“straight-backed old women with windfall apple faces”. The pulsating plot rattles along, rather like Coughlin’s old automobile, but this is also a tale with potent and disturbing things to say about profiteering and the racism that blights America.’ —Martin Chilton, Independent

‘I'm delighted to report that this book contains the same fantastic writing as Xan Brooks’ first novel. He has created the most wonderful cast of characters that Coughlin meets along his travels and has again shown his ability to create humour and pathos in unlikely places … I really can't recommend this book highly enough, it deserves a very wide audience and recognition.’ —Alexandra Foster, The Precious Words

‘Immersive … The Catchers dramatises a unique period of American history with subtlety and an impressive amount of period detail.’ —Jude Cook, Literary Review

‘The Best Historical Fiction – Elegant and eloquent, this is a cautionary tale of melody and myth-making, where the grim realities of exploitation tussle with the transformative power of music.’ —Eithne Farry, Daily Mail

‘Ten Great New Novels – In 2027, it will be the centenary of the Mississippi Delta flood, an event that added an extra layer of complication to the process. This is the background to The Catchers, the name given to those pioneers who fanned out in search of songs to “catch” on their cumbersome “musical lathe”. In 1927 few, if any, had penetrated far into the Delta, where there were Black musicians in abundance, but their gold had to be somehow extracted from the sludge of Jim Crow society – the plantation, the prisons and the poverty.’ —Ed Needham, Strong Words

‘Racism and the ambivalent relationship between the two men – is Coughlin Moss's saviour or another white exploiter? – threaten their progress in this incisive, sharply written novel.’ —Nick Rennison, The Sunday Times

‘The Catchers is a spacious, sweeping novel whose canvas covers the wilds of Appalachia, raw poverty coexisting with luxury; but the author homes in on the figures in the landscape and makes you feel for the opportunistic catcher and the mistrustful boy who could bring him his big hit.’ —Lee Langley, The Spectator

‘Brooks turns this voyage of discovery into something of a magical quest, layered with memorable characters and thoughtful ideas on racism, exploitation and naked greed.’ —Ben East, Observer

‘It’s smartly told, featuring fine period details and solid dialogue.’ —NJ McGarrigle, Irish Times

‘The author immerses us in the period and various locations, as well as recalling the horrific racism of the time. Several of his unsavoury characters, some gloriously Dickensian, are the stuff of nightmares, while the central relationship of Coughlin and Moss — and their mutual distrust — is utterly credible. Brooks’s vivid depiction of the Mississippi flood of 1927, “dogs climbing trees, bears grabbing driftwood” and its tragic aftermath, is hard to shake.’ —Lucy Popescu, Financial Times

‘The Catchers is a finely wrought romp, a picaresque odyssey replete with shady characters galore and all manner of high-jinx, but the book doesn’t shy away from flagging up the business model that the record companies rely on to make their riches. It’s a tale about capitalism, red in tooth and claw, with those holding the means of production and distribution all singing from the same sheet. Their song? Exploitation.’ —The Crack Magazine

‘Brooks’s world-building is ­impressive, his characters striking and authentic and the horror of the Great Mississippi Flood is particularly well rendered … A compelling read.’ —Estelle Birdy, Irish Independent

‘The journey out of the delta takes us into a world of Southern gothic that bristles with expertly calibrated menace and moral ambiguity.’ —Harry Strawson, TLS

‘This book deals with some of the most painful episodes of African American history, and one can’t help being conscious at times of Brooks as a white British writer, a disconnection made more treacherous by the fact that the book is itself about cultural appropriation. Brooks is clearly well aware of this problem, and deals with it boldly, letting his Black characters feel a hatred that is sometimes ugly, while showing the white characters meriting that hatred, even as they are fully human. And as historical fiction, The Catchers is a delight. It puts us in a world that feels both fantastical and achingly real, at once completely alien and vividly our own.’ —Sandra Newman, The Guardian

Praise for Previous Work

‘A fairytale wrapped within a historical novel, it’s as quixotic and dreamlike as Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.’ —Alex Preston, author of In Love and War

‘This will be familiar to fans of Decline And Fall. But what Evelyn Waugh treated satirically isn’t so funny any more, and this well-written novel is more tender and sad than bitingly hilarious.’ —Fanny Blake, Daily Mail

‘With its finely judged atmosphere of tainted innocence, Brooks’s novel frames the real horrors of post-conflict trauma as episodes of near-fairytale jeopardy: the grown-up terrors in the dark wood and the poisonous intoxications of the great house are trials in which his heroine’s strength of character is forged. As in fairy stories, the happy-ever-after consists of the simplest of fulfilled desires: a home, work, a family: love as ordinary and essential as bread.’ —Jane Shilling, Evening Standard

‘Set after the first world war, is a macabre and unsettling tale of a young girl who is made a plaything of the “funny men”, a group of damaged soldiers, so badly injured they have removed themselves from the world completely. The novel has a woozy, tainted fairytale quality – Brooks calls these molten men of his the Tin Man and the Scarecrow – and a heightened aspect, like looking at the world through a cracked magnifying glass. It’s a bizarre, horror-flecked novel, pleasingly distinctive in its oddness.’ —Natasha Tripney, Observer

‘A stunning, beautifully written debut by Xan Brooks … A masterful first novel.’ —Sophie Raworth, Read by Raworth

‘Brooks writes stunningly and paints a dark, imaginative picture so vivid I could see it made into a film.’ —Caz Roberts, Grazia

‘The year is 1923 and the trauma of the First World War has left Britain misshapen. Part of society hopes for social change, while others, ossified, look backward. This dark, magical tale explores the chasm between the two, and how a nation ravaged by “the storms of the things they once did, the people they once were” seeks redemption.’ —Philly Malicka, The Telegraph