Small Rivers
Christmas, 2016. Toby and Angelica are back at their father’s farm. He is at the end of the worst year of his life.
Struggling in every way, and in desperate need of help with work, Frank hires Jerzy, a Polish worker, who now lives on the farm with his pregnant wife, Irena. Previous worker Damien convinces himself that his home and job have been stolen from him by migrant workers.
Jerzy and Irena keep noticing Damien’s menacing presence, but Frank, Toby and Angelica are too wrapped up in their own problems to help; tensions run high as they try to find a new normal.
Examining the cultural fractures in Britain at the end of 2016 and the impact of the EU referendum on rural farming communities, Small Rivers explores grief, trust, national identity and xenophobia, asking how we can reconcile the relationships between people and place.
‘It takes a brave writer to tackle Brexit and the exhaustion and collapse of a country – and its countryside – while injecting the resultant book with consistent flashes of beauty in the writing and, at the close, the tiniest sliver of hope. Harry Gallon shows us the landscape we inhabit – natural, social, political – and brings it to vivid, messy life.’
- Will Ashon, author of Chamber Music
‘Small Rivers deftly conveys the hostility that simmers in a broken country. Gallon’s haunting prose invokes an unwavering sense of place, and reveals the dirty reality of rural life and all its fetid truths.’
- Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them
‘No flimsy pastoral, Small Rivers, is vast in scope yet acutely intimate. Gallon wields the extraordinary prose with the precision of a surgeon exposing the raw, ugly metastasises of family dynamics and the far from bucolic joys of agricultural life. This book seethes with menace, and I loved it.’
- Heidi James, author of The Sound Mirror
'A well observed and astute Brexit satire, by turns poetic and razor-sharp, Small Rivers explores the psyche of a messed up country through the microcosm of family life on a rural farm.'
- Sam Mills, author of Fragments of My Father
Published by Dead Ink Books, 13th May 2021
EVERY FOX IS A RABID FOX
Robert didn't mean to kill his brother.
Now he's stuck between grief and guilt with only ex-girlfriend willow and the ghost of his dead twin sister for company.
Terrified of doing more harm, Robert's hysteria and anxiety grow while Willow and his sister's ghost fight over him: one trying to save him, the other digging his grave.
'Gallon writes with such disregard for the rules that his writing comes across both shockingly vibrant, ground breaking and brutal all at the same time. Harry Gallon is a name you need to remember and a voice you wont forget.'
- Ross Jeffery, Storgy
'There is dark, biting humour in this novel but it is also desperately, heartbreakingly sad and you can’t help but feel for everyone caught up in the mess.'
- Jane Wright, Litro
'Gallon's writing is lucid and mordantly funny. I loved this book.'
- Claire Fuller, author of Our Endless Numbered Days
'Beautifully executed tale of innocence, tragedy, and the family traumas we fail to leave behind.'
- Fernando Sdrigotti, author of Dysfunctional Males
Published by Dead Ink Books, 2017
Made possible with the generous support of The Society of Authors K Blundell Trust Award
THE SHAPES OF
DOGS' EYES
'Something strange is happening to the lovelorn, scared young people of London.
They’re unhappy, I know it. And they’re under the dogs’ control.'
The Shapes of Dogs’ Eyes explores love, homelessness, and a restless sense of uncertainty in a modern London as brittle and unmoored, as familiar and as chimerical, as the characters that move through it.
'Gallon’s at his best when he writes about people and places and things. The Shapes of Dogs’ Eyes succeeds when there is no pretence, just descriptions of life as lived. Gallon is a keen observer and expert chronicler.'
- Scott Manley Hadley, Open Pen.
Published by Dead Ink Books, 2015
