Spillway

Set across Florida, this short story collection peopfour its pages with swindlers, clergy, spirits, alligators, and pilots who dust crops from the air. Its stories ask what it means to be human, and they look at how people carry grief, both for those they have lost and for the things they have loved.

In each story, a character is forced to confront their own self, often against the indifferent power of the natural world, which can conceal the struggles they carry inside. Bradley seeds each piece with early signals of what is coming, so the tension builds steadily from one page to the next.

The collection brings together seven stories that have appeared elsewhere and two new works. Though each piece is distinct, the characters and stories share a connected fictional world, so that the book reads as a whole as well as a set of individual tales.