‘The Whale Tattoo’ is a stunning achievement - one of the most impressive and assured debuts I’ve ever read'. Matt Cain

‘A powerful new voice of gay working-class life…This eloquent heart-felt debut pulls the reader right besde him, and announces Ransom as a writer of real talent.’ Guardian

'A bold, brilliant and beautiful debut" Susannah Dunn

‘With assured narrative, a vivid sense of place and atmosphere, and flint-sharp dialogue, Jon Ransom has written a novel that is bleak and brutal, but never sentimental.. utterly authentic and cruelly beautiful’  Matt Bates

‘ Raw, uncompromising, and authentic, a remarkable debut from an astonishingly gifted writer'  Golnoosh Nour

‘If you only read one debut novel this year make it this one. The Whale Tattoo is a book of visceral, magnetic raw pulsating beauty. A mesmeric, gritty tour de force. We haven’t read a novel this brilliant since Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski. This book is the reason that people love to read.’ Attitude Magazine

‘It’s a fine work of queer literature’. Damian Barr’s Literary Salon

‘An astonishing book. Jon Ransom’s writing manages to be simultaneiously brutal and violent as well as poetic and moving. The quality of his prose if mesmerising’ Linda Jill, Linda’s Book Bag

‘This guy is an incredible new talent. A short book that punches well above its weight: explicit, brutal and moving’. Isabel Costello

 ‘An astounding debut by an important new voice in queer literature with a completely unique sense of language. Simply a triumph’ 5 *****’. Love Reading, Thomas Schwentenwien.

‘The novel scratches an itch that few books can reach. It’s Ransom’s raw reflection on life, his recognition of the brutality that transforms moments of passing rapture into something dreamy that leaves the reader entranced’. Neil Czeszejko. The Most Anticipated Books of 2022, Delphic Reviews

‘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. Complex, fraught and violent, The Whale Tattoo reads like an early Tracy Lett’s play – a steaming mix of blue-collar rage and menace’. The Queer Review

‘Seldom, outside the realms of gay royalty like Alan Hollinghurst, have I read a novel about gay people so well written. I can’t recall the last time I read a novel with such a sense of place. This is a story that lives on long after the last full stop. And deserves to be read’. Charles Coussens.

‘I can strongly recommend The Whale Tattoo…I cannot recall when a book – especially one from a first-time author – had such an effect on me’ Rob Harkavy, Out News Global

‘This book felt reminiscent of something like a Max Porter or an Andrew Michael Hurley, at the same time shot through with shades of Douglas Stuart. Waste-landscapes and dead-eyed people drinking their lives away in fetid squalor. And yet, there remains the capacity for love (although unnamed, unvoiced), as well as the dogged resistance against the pull of nihilism’. Luke Murphy. Bookseller

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