Dodgers

Winner of the British Book Award for Best Crime & Thriller Novel 2017
Winner of the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger Award 2016
Winner of the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award 2016
Winner of the LA Times Book Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the British Book Award for Overall Book of the Year 2017
Shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel 2017
Shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction 2017
'This is - quite simply - one of the best books I've read in a VERY long time' - Don Winslow
'One of the best literary crime novels you will read in your lifetime' - Donald Ray Pollock
Dodgers is a dark, unforgettable coming-of-age journey that recalls the very best of Richard Price, Denis Johnson, and J.D. Salinger.
When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin.
Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they've ever known in a nondescript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn't have.
Along the way, the country surprises East. The blood on his hands isn't the blood he expects. And he reaches places where only he can decide which way to go - or which person to become.
By way of The Wire and in the spirit of Scott Smith's A Simple Plan and Richard Price's Clockers, Dodgers is itself something entirely original: a gripping literary crime novel with a compact cast whose intimate story opens up to become a reflection on the nature of belonging and reinvention.
'Told in precise, economical prose, Bill Beverly's debut novel Dodgers is well worth the read' - Guardian
'A road movie, a coming-of-age tale, a crime novel of gritty realism and a hugely impressive debut' - Irish Times
'Violent, insightful and beautifully written' - Metro
'An intense, dangerous debut' - Express
'Exposes the real fears and deep sadness of teenagers who grow up in a world of poverty, drugs and violence' - Times

Bill Beverly was born and grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He studied literature and writing at Oberlin College, including time in London studying theatre and the Industrial Revolution. He then studied fiction and pursued a Ph.D. in American literature at the University of Florida. His research on criminal fugitives and the stories surrounding them became the book On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America. He now teaches American literature and writing at Trinity University in Washington D.C. and lives with his wife, the poet and writer Deborah Ager, and their daughter Olive, in Hyattsville, Maryland. He collects beer cans. Dodgers is his debut novel.