Daybreak

“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.” —Publishers Weekly“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“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“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“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.” —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?

Matt Gallagher is a US Army veteran and the author of four books, including the novels Youngblood and Daybreak. His work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Wired, among other places. A graduate of Wake Forest and Columbia, he is the recipient of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fellowship, and was selected as the 2022 Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum Writer-in-Residence. He lives with his family in Colorado.