The Heron Catchers is the 2024 International Rubery Book Award Winner

I'm very happy to announce that The Heron Catchers was just named the winner in the fiction category of The International Rubery Book Award! It was up against some truly excellent novels, so this is quite a surprise to me – but a wonderful one, and a huge honor as well.

This is what the Rubery Book Award judges wrote about The Heron Catchers:

"A lovely novel about relationships and duty told from the perspective of an American expat in Japan.  Sedge’s wife has left him, and the novel deals with his predicament and how cultural sensitivities and obligations bear on his understanding and response. The complexities of his relationship with Mariko, a woman he meets at his place of work, make for an interesting love story.  Her unsympathetic stepson, Riku, provides a moral test for the protagonists, and an effective element of tension that builds nicely as the book develops. It’s a love story between Sedge and Mariko, but it’s just as much an exploration of Sedge and Riku’s relationship, too, which is far more complex, and compellingly conveyed. The tone and atmosphere are expertly handled - it feels like an English translation of a Japanese novel (something like Murakami, or Banana Yoshimoto). The narrative style is often deceiving in its simplicity, and I think it’s this style that confirms the sense that Sedge is always, and perhaps will always be, an outsider in this Japanese culture. The author is clearly steeped in the culture, and the heron imagery is integrated into the story well, and nicely handled, particularly at the end. All in all, it works brilliantly."