Tombolo Books welcomes author Joe Pan to the bookstore to celebrate his debut novel, Florida Palms! Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities.

Pan will be in conversation with local author Shane Hinton!

PURCHASE YOUR COPY HERE!

More about Florida Palms

It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.

What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.

In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.

Joe Pan is the author of five poetry books and founder of Brooklyn Arts Press, one of the smallest independent houses ever honored with a National Book Award in Poetry, and publisher of Augury Books, honored with a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and Poets & Writers, and he’s been profiled by Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, and The Wall Street Journal. He grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and now lives in Los Angeles. With his wife he cofounded BAH, an activist group that serves unhoused populations with sleeping bags and goods. Florida Palms is his debut novel.

Shane Hinton is the author of three books of fiction: Pinkies, Radio Dark, and Other Shane Hintons. He is the editor of the anthology We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida and is a fiction editor for Tampa Review. He teaches writing at The University of Tampa and lives in the winter strawberry capital of the world.