Daybreak
A disillusioned American veteran volunteers for the war in Ukraine to reconnect with a woman from his past.
“Daybreak is a work of art, a gleaming, fanged nightmare of a book by a major American author who himself is an Army veteran … Gallagher’s writing captures how rich and strange my native country is while layering the monstrousness of the new war on top … There is a privilege Americans have when it comes to narrating a foreign conflict, a privilege that isn’t always earned. Gallagher, however, has approached the topic of Americans in the context of Ukraine with humility and humanity. I can only hope Western politicians will be willing to do the same.”
– Natalia Antonova, Foreign Policy
“In Daybreak, Gallagher provides readers with a nuanced, polyphonic, tender, and violent portrait of a country and its people rallying together to repel one of the world’s bullies for the sake of democracy, normalcy, and their very existences.”
– Julian Zabalbeascoa, Electric Literature
“There’s no such thing as a good war, but the defense of Ukraine provides one of the modern era’s most straightforward cases of a necessary one … To write about war in plain, vigorous language one must think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly, one cannot be politically orthodox. Matt Gallagher is an unusual kind of person as well, with a temperament all too rare these days. We should be proud that the United States still produces writers like him. Daybreak represents some of his finest work.”
– Dewaine Farria, Consequence
Illuminating and shattering … There are no soap opera reunions in store for Pax and Svitlana; Gallagher is too firm a realist for that. But he appreciates that love and human connection are often the things that save a soldier, and he deftly draws that injured but lasting connection in delicate strokes. His restraint has been compared to Hemingway’s by some critics and his prose to Fitzgerald’s, and that praise is not excessive. This is surely among the finest fiction written in English about this 21st-century eastern European war … Daybreak is a deeply moral book focused on the universal conflicts of conscience and duty.”
– Kathryn Eastburn, Rocky Mountain Reader
“Echoes of Hemingway and Casablanca … this harrowing account of life in a besieged Ukraine reads like a bulletin from the front lines.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“Matt Gallagher has written an important and timely novel, which works as a powerful testimonial to Ezra Pound’s statement that literature is news that remains news. Daybreak is history and memory at its most raw, intimate, and brilliant, and is a book to be widely read and discussed.”
– Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
“Daybreak takes the reader on a thrilling journey through war-time Ukraine. The plot moves at the speed of a road movie, intensifying every detail of the story, each word spoken by the characters who may well be based on people the author met during his recent trips to Ukraine’s front lines. Shocking and totally believable.”
– Andrey Kurkov, author of Grey Bees
“Equal parts love story and war story, Daybreak is a profound meditation on idealism and its costs, a vital novel that arrives at a perilous time.”
– Elliot Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War
“We are living through such a renaissance of veteran’s writing, and Matt Gallagher is one of the very best. Daybreak is set in the Russia–Ukraine war, exploring the motivations and fates of Americans who go to fight with Ukraine. It’s an unsparing but empathetic character study — but it’s so much more than that. Reading it brought to mind the masterful work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
– Kori Schake, War on the Rocks
” An absorbing character study of a man purging the ghosts of one war by attempting to fight in another. ”
– Kirkus
“With bold themes of desire, courage, love, forgiveness, and sacrifice, Matt Gallagher has written the first great military-inspired novel of this post-Global War on Terror era.”
– Bill McCloud, author of What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?