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.

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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.

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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.

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Immersive … The Catchers dramatises a unique period of American history with subtlety and an impressive amount of period detail.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.