The Whale Tattoo

Product Information

A powerful new voice of gay working-class life…This eloquent heart-felt debut pulls the reader right beside him .

I’m not honestly sure how well the playtext fits: it felt more interesting than essential but having finished the book I’m minded to reread that section with the knowledge of what will happen. I loved the way this book was written—a rich character study that ingrained itself deeply within the protagonist's mind. And yes, there’s quite a lot of sex, which feels entirely appropriate for these lads, at their age, in this setting - again furthering the essence of the protagonist’s voice.He turns to his sister, Birdee, the only person who has ever listened, but their bond, as well as the one he has with local fisherman and long-time lover Tim Fysh, is not without trouble. Maybe I just didn't like the writing style and other people would love this, but if the book hadn't been so short I would have left this one unfinished. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Jon Ransom's debut novel pulls no punches in a story which at its core is about loss and how people [fail to] deal with it. What had really appealed to me when I first heard about the book was that it was offering a spread in time and would move forward thirty years to London at the time of AIDS.

Support our vendors this winter and beyond If you can't visit your local vendor on a regular basis, then the next best way to support them is with a subscription to the Big Issue. Though this is Joe’s story, of the father he loathes, the sister he loves, it is mainly about his life-long gay relationship with a fisherman, Fysh and him coming to terms with the suicide of his mother. And grief is central to the narrative to the extent that Joe’s mental health is unbalanced and yet perfectly understandable. In sometimes dream-like, deliberately disjointed language, a tale is told of after a flood in early 1950s east England somewhere.Ransom’s short stories have appeared in SAND Journal, Foglifter Press and FIVE:2:ONE, amongst others. It is a novel about Joe Gunner and his life and experiences as a working class child, adolescent and young man dealing with everything that growing up in a decaying fishing town in Norfolk. Through vivid dreamscapes and backstories, Joe's story emerges as one of love, lust, and loss, and a personal journey that ultimately leads to the path of acceptance and redemption. When the Dust Settles is crisis management expert Lucy Easthope’s memoir of existing in the aftermath of disaster.

I COULD NOT put this book down once I decided to start reading it, each page that turned, drew me further into the story. We would also like to use cookies (including from third-party providers like Google) to monitor site traffic so we can understand our audiences and provide personalised advertising for Book Festival events you may be interested in. When a giant sperm whale washes up on the local beach and tells Joe Gunner that death will follow him wherever he goes. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Under his watchful gaze, Eli discovers a world he knows nothing about with rules he cannot understand.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. Nothing startling there but forty odd years later I am astounded that in the course of my lifetime a whole new literature has come into being and I can not imagine anyone asking about the need for another 'gay' novel. Jon Ransom’s debut novel, The Whale Tattoo, is filled with prose that picks you up in its wake and takes you on a journey.