In Murray Hall, Milo Allan crafts a novel that feels like a whispered confession passed through time; one that lingers long after the final page. Set against the gaslit backdrop of turn-of-the-century New York, this historical fiction unearths the extraordinary life of a man who defied the rigid binaries of his era, not with rebellion, but with quiet, persistent presence.

Allan’s prose is elegant and restrained, allowing the story’s emotional weight to emerge organically. We learn of the titular Hall, a political operator, gambler, and social chameleon whose death in 1901 reveals a secret that shocks the city and rewrites the narrative of his life. But this is no sensationalist tale. Instead, Allan invites us into the intimate spaces between public persona and private truth, where identity is not declared, but lived, and where courage often wears the mask of ordinary routine.

What makes Murray Hall so compelling is its refusal to flatten its subject into a symbol. Hall is rendered with complexity and contradiction: a man of ambition and tenderness, of secrets and sincerity. The novel’s structure – part investigative journalism, part character study – mirrors the fragmented way we uncover truth, piece by piece, through memory, myth, and the stories others tell about us.

There’s a subtle brilliance in how Allan handles the novel’s central revelation. Rather than framing it as a twist (really, we know the conclusion, but enjoy the journey to it), it becomes a lens through which every preceding moment is reinterpreted. The result is a narrative that feels both timeless and timely, resonating with contemporary conversations about gender, authenticity, and the cost of invisibility.

It’s in the character Joe Young’s smoky reflection, “Ah’d say Murray was one who lost a few lives along the way. So be it. Lives are made to be lost,” that the soul of Murray Hall flickers most vividly. Milo Allan lingers here, not for sentimentality, but to let this line echo like a gambler’s maxim or an epitaph scribbled on the back of a playing card. The card room scene is less about a game than a séance, each deal peeling back layers of memory and myth. Hall’s life, as Joe tells it, wasn’t a single, linear tale but a shuffled deck of selves; played, folded, reshuffled. In this moment, identity becomes an act of survival and reinvention, and the novel quietly insists: the lives we lose say as much about us as the ones we live.

Murray Hall is not just a novel about a man who lived a hidden life, it’s a meditation on the lives we all construct, the masks we wear, and the truths we bury beneath them. It’s a story that asks us to look again, to listen more closely, and to honour the quiet revolutions that unfold in the margins of history.

Rating: 4/5

It takes a lot to write about a figure that is completely absent from the entire length of the novel. However with the multiple viewpoints offered by the hounding investigations of Sam Clellan, his determination to discover the real Murray Hall offers us glimpses here and there. No one will ever know him or understand him. The enigma of Murray Hall, the lack of understanding of diversity despite it being just as prolific as it is today, leads us to question sex, gender and the fragmented nature of society. This book wasn’t what I was expecting; in all the right ways. Loved it.

I had never heard of Murray Hall before coming across this book, and his story is a fascinating one. We know very little about much of his life, but his death was surrounded by spectacle and scandal.

This book doesn’t attempt to answer the unanswerable questions we may have, although it is meticulously researched and presents us with virtually all known information about Hall. Having a journalist as the main character was really helpful in this regard, as we got to know all the facts in a way that felt very natural, as well as some of the fictionalised personal details.

The authors are very clear that we don’t know whether or not Hall would have identified as transgender if he lived today, but rather that his story – alongside countless others – is evidence that gender diversity has always existed in some form or another. What struck me about Sam, the journalist, and his character arc, is that uncovering Hall’s story encourages him to think about both gender and society as a whole in a much more nuanced, open-minded way. He begins to question his previously held beliefs about the way society and gender roles dictate someone’s position in life, and ultimately is a better person for it.

The big drawback for me, though, is that I never felt like I really got to know Sam as a character. There are some hints about his upbringing and his past, but I never felt like I had a good grip on who he is and why he’s doing what he’s doing. When he first starts to talk about his personal feelings about the Hall story, I was surprised; I felt like his opinions at that point were at odds with the character we’d met so far. I think he could have been a really powerful character with lots of depth, but it never quite came to fruition.

Overall, this is a great book for introducing you to a part of queer history you may know nothing about, and an always-important reminder that trans people have always existed.

I received a free copy for review.