Once You Break A Knuckle

D. W. Wilson’s Dead Roads was the stand-out winner of the 2011 BBC Short Story Award. My worry was that it might also be the stand-out story in this debut collection, but no – the standard is consistently, astonishingly high throughout. There are echoes of Wells Tower and Russell Banks, but Wilson’s voice is distinctive, confident and completely enthralling.”

D. W. Wilson's stories - fuelled by tough, streetwise prose - are alight with tension, wisdom and wit.

The stories patiently gather the full power of a novel. By the time he's done, Mr Wilson has mapped this place as precisely as any cartographer could.

"His characters are tough, sometimes hard-drinking skilled labourers and local police officers from the remote Kootenay Valley in British Columbia, men with names like Animal and Walla, but they are also tender, confused and painfully vulnerable - romantics, under the calluses, in the Scott Fitzgerald vein, yearning for love and a connection with the world around them, but too raw and frightened to make the attempt."