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. I even wonder if I have the right to add my voice to the chorus because it likely only does me credit for joining such distinguished company.

It all began with a dead whale on the shore and things have been slipping from Joe's control ever since. This affair comes with dangerous entanglements and deadly consequences for both of them as their private passion is threatened by the encroaching pressures and prejudices of the suffocating community that they can't seem to escape. Our protagonist Joe is 22, and left his home town of King’s Lynn suddenly two years ago after something terrible happened. Ultimately, this is a tale of hope in the face of our demons and an exercise in finding the beauty and tenderness in the brutality of life.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. 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. 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.

Queerness, poverty, mental health, class and redemption all jostle cheek by jowl against a filthy beautiful landscape of edges and erosion. While he struggles to move beyond that incriminating day, he starts up a romantic relationship with one of his aunt Dreama's field-hands, Jimmy Smart, while also trying to better understand how he perceives himself differently from other men and why his feminine sensibilities are one that draw scorn and ridicule from the discerning eyes of his peers.It isn’t a very long section but it does not work as far as I am concerned and I couldn’t see its relevance. Recounting this novel's story line and adding words of praise is inadequate for what I feel about this novel so instead I am going to try and show via an anecdote why this book is so remarkable to me.