Ransom’s short stories have appeared in SAND Journal, Foglifter Press and FIVE:2:ONE and most recently, Queer Life, Queer Love. This made for a gusty and at times grubby read as well as exerting an almost elemental power especially with Eli’s relationships with the female characters. Setting up an epic does the story a disservice; the Gallopers is beautifully focused with an eye for the small details of the senses, layering the central mystery of what happened to the narrators mother in the flood of 1953 with the intimate descriptions of the narrator’s sexual desire and experiences. When it finally splinters at the reader’s feet, its belly reveals the turmoil beneath, the intrigue thickened by roiling passions.

Set against the decaying edge lands of East Anglia, with a declining fishing industry and poverty nipping hard at everyone's heels, this is extremely bleak and quite abstract in many ways.It was just too confusing for me, and if there's someone who has more patience and tolerance who can make an educated guess to explain it to me, I'll be more than happy to read it again with a fresher perspective. Jon's new book The Gallopers is a visceral and mesmerising novel of deceit, desire and unspeakable loss. We find innovative solutions to help people into employment and campaign in parliament for a better future. It’s a book packed with explosive secrets and deception, but it’s the hard-to-express emotions and the longing for love that lends this poignant tale its momentum.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I should add that this may be in part due to the formatting issues in my review copy, which often made the writing more fractured than intended). The Whale Tattoo’ is a stunning achievement - one of the most impressive and assured debuts I’ve ever read'. I was interested to see where Eli's story would lead to - 'born with a fondness for pretty things, keeping my fingernails clean, hair combed. It seems an odd stylistic choice and now I’m very aware that Paul Murray’s “ The Bee Sting” also saw the author making odd choices and that ended up as my current Book Of The Year but here I’m just puzzled.In sometimes dream-like, deliberately disjointed language, a tale is told of after a flood in early 1950s east England somewhere. Joe is an open wound of a man who is taunted by the trauma and anxieties of his life in the nefarious form of a dying whale on the shore. That restlessness that keeps you up all night, when the moon is as bright as a dinner plate licked clean, won’t last for ever. In their different ways, both of this year’s winning books expand our understanding of what LGBTQ+ literature can and should be,” said Paul Burston, prize founder and chair of judges for both categories.