An authentic portrait of gay love in small-town Britain: The Whale Tattoo reviewed

In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set in the liminal landscape of Norfolk’s tidal wetlands, it’s an urgent, roiling tale of gay love, suppressed traumas and lives cut short. A working-class writer with no formal education, Norfolk-raised Ransom wrote the first draft on his phone on a bus. Muswell Press has launched it to considerable acclaim, including an appearance at Damian Barr’s Literary Salon.

After a whale washed up on a beach tells Joe Gunner that death will stalk him wherever he goes, he leaves home. But two years later he returns, to a town haunted by ghosts, some living, some dead. He rekindles his relationship with the magnetic local fisherman Tim Fysh (‘one night gone, and already he’s busted beneath my skin’), converses with his drowned sister Birdee and collects his ailing father from hospital.