Battleborn - Softcover

'This assured collection brings together stories from the underbelly of Nevadan life.' --Guardian

'Her remarkably assured and arresting collection of stories, Battleborn, draws on her own family history and life among the casinos, brothels and deserts of her native Nevada.' --Nicholas Wore, Guardian

'I urge you to read these spellbinding tales set in the arid landscape of Claire's home state of Nevada. This is the American west at its most other-worldly - a dark, visceral and raw place where her contemporary characters are weighed down by their past.' --Wales Online

'Extraordinary... This is a very eccentric, tough, wise new voice.' --The Times

'This carefully controlled collection of short stories, which tells of hardship and madness in the American West, has just won the Dylan Thomas Prize - and deservedly so.' --Sunday Telegraph

I'd love to find Claire Vaye Watkins's Battleborn in my Christmas stocking. --'Books of the Year' chosen by Jackie Kay, Observer

'This carefully controlled collection of short stories, which tells of hardship and madness in the American West, has just won the Dylan Thomas Prize - and deservedly so.' --Sunday Telegraph

The most exciting book of fiction I read this past year. From the moment I opened the first pages I was enthralled, utterly and completely. I was awed by the astonishing variety, intelligence, and subtle invention of the stories. Fantastic stuff. --The Millions

'This carefully controlled collection of short stories, which tells of hardship and madness in the American West, has just won the Dylan Thomas Prize - and deservedly so.' --Sunday Telegraph

The stories in Battleborn all unfold in Watkins's home state of Nevada, from down south in Nye County and Las Vegas, to Reno, Lake Tahoe, and the Blackrock Desert, the site of Burning Man. We are introduced to a very specific small town America, to those homes and lives off the highway - the ones travellers and writers usually drive past on their way to somewhere else. While the locations are ordinary, the characters and Watkins' telling of their lives are anything but. There is the man who finds a cache of letters, pills and a photograph abandoned by the side of the road and as he writes to the man he imagines left them behind, reveals moving truths about himself ('The Last Thing We Need'); the man in late middle age who finds a troubled, pregnant teen dying in the desert and, through her, begins to dream of regaining the family he lost ('Man-O-War'); the brothers caught in the early days of the gold rush ('The Diggings'); and the sisters unable to comfort each other following their mother's suicide ('Graceland'). And there is the first story ('Ghosts, Cowboys'), a semi-autobiographical account of a troubled - and famous - family history.