Daybreak

September 1, 2023

U.S. army veteran Luke "Pax" Paxton has been stumbling along for a decade when an old army buddy suggests that they go to Ukraine to help counter the Russian invasion. His motives aren't all humanitarian: he wants to find a Ukrainian woman named Svitlana he knew from his soldiering days. From U.S. veteran Gallagher (Youngblood), the 2022 Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum writer-in-residence. Prepub Alert.

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December 15, 2023
An American veteran seeks a purpose in war-torn Ukraine. Two former American soldiers arrive in Ukraine not long after the Russian invasion. They are Luke Paxton, the protagonist, and Han Lee--though Paxton is known as "Pax," which feels meaningful in a book about the effects of war. Gallagher writes, "...Lee hadn't been able to shake the sense of lost purpose in the homeland so now he was here, to again carry the gun." Pax is also looking for a sense of purpose--he tells a fellow veteran, "I came to help....But I don't know how"--but he's also looking for an old flame named Svitlana Dovbush. Eventually, Pax and Lee part ways, and Pax finds himself adrift in Lviv. He does reconnect with Svitlana, who in the intervening years has gotten married and had a son; Pax learns that her marriage is fraying, and that her husband is away on the front lines of combat. Gallagher mostly sticks to Pax's perspective, but notably, it's through Svitlana that we learn how they parted ways years before. Several of the novel's Ukrainian characters take pains to point out how little the well-intentioned Americans know about the conflict. Bogdan, a recruiter, tells them, "I've been surprised how many arrivals are willing to fight and kill for my country...yet have no idea the war has been going for eight years." And there's tension surrounding Pax's place in the narrative; late in the book, Svitlana tells him, "Don't you dare do that thing that makes everything in the world about you." It's an absorbing character study of a man purging the ghosts of one war by attempting to fight in another. An understated look at the physical and psychological effects of war.

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January 15, 2024
Gallagher (Empire City) returns with an affecting chronicle of a former U.S. soldier who finds meaning by joining Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Five years out of the Army and at loose ends, Luke Paxton accompanies his fellow Afghanistan veteran, Han Lee, to Ukraine in winter 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion. Arriving in Lviv, Pax looks up his former lover, Svitlana, whom he met in Milan in between tours in Afghanistan. At first Svitlana is cool toward him, and it turns out she’s separated from her lawyer husband, who’s at the front, and has a young son with eye problems. Judged unfit for combat because of his general discharge from the Army (the story behind this comes out later), Pax goes to work in a warehouse unloading supplies from the U.S. Then, news from the front forces him to join a dangerous mission that will allow him to exorcise the ghosts of his past. Gallagher’s plot artfully connects the present-day conflict to previous wars by referencing such stories as A Farewell to Arms and Casablanca without sacrificing a sense of urgency. This harrowing account of life in a besieged Ukraine reads like a bulletin from the front lines.