The Whale Tattoo

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The Whale Tattoo’ is a stunning achievement - one of the most impressive and assured debuts I’ve ever read'. They’re just very matter of fact and again like the rest of this book they lack any emotion or creativity. Bates added: "Formally daring, The Gallopers is a work of absolute authenticity and rare brilliance that will delight fans of The Whale Tattoo as well as winning Jon a new legion of readers. The body of water it holds penetrates the protagonist’s psyche, floods reality in a way that is both hungry and foreboding.

Our protagonist Joe is 22, and left his home town of King’s Lynn suddenly two years ago after something terrible happened. The closing quarter of this book is filled with every twist and turn imaginable, making this more of a thriller in it’s final throws. The first thing readers are bound to take note of regarding Jon Ransom’s debut novel, THE WHALE TATTOO (2022; 231 pp. The book convincingly portrays the claustrophobia of an English small town, especially where you grow up queer and people live hard lives. The first of the books I had highlighted as a must-read for 2024 was very nearly my first five star rating of the year.Then as the sea settles and Joe learns the truth about the river and finds that we all have the capability to hate, and that we can all make the choice not to.

The roundabout is populated by typical garish painted horses with a single horse painted grey The author uses this as a metaphor for the main characters difference being an overtly camp homosexual man. he felt like a real three-dimensional person, and his struggles, with his sexuality and together with the grief, following the loss of his mother in the flood felt very real. Ransom’s fractured, distinctive prose highlights the beauty and brutality of his story, his extraordinarily vivid sense of place saturates the reader with the wet of the river, and the salty tang of the heaving sea.Soon, the love that they each have in their lives overflows into hate that may very well destroy them.

Ransom was awarded an Arts Council grant to develop The Gallopers, the synopsis for which said: "Highly original and remarkably atmospheric, this mesmerising story focuses on the lives of three gay men, over 30 years, from the North Sea floods of 1953 to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

He developed The Whale Tattoo at Arvon Fiction: Work in Progress retreat,after winning a place on the 2018 Arts Council England TLC Free Read Scheme. Eli’s aunt allows Jimmy, whose family work the merry-go-round at fairs (the gallopers) to stay in their barn and Eli finds himself becoming obsessed.

Matt Cain on Instagram: "I was hugely impressed by Jon Ransom’s debut novel The Whale Tattoo but The Gallopers is even better.This book felt reminiscent of something like a Max Porter or an Andrew Michael Hurley, at the same time shot through with shades of Douglas Stuart. A young fem man, Eli is an outsider at a time when being 'a sissy' (language I found disturbing, however accurate) is guaranteed to cause problems.