Deserters: A Novel (Acre Books, 2026)
It is fall 1864, and Robert Riley has deserted his Army of the Potomac unit outside Petersburg, Virginia. Exhausted from years of war and worried about his motherless sons in Ohio, he returns to collect thirteen-year-old Michael and Sean, three years older, and flees to the Western territories. Along the way, he encounters Janey, an orphan at sixteen, who is also eager to go West. When Riley sees in her a quickness of mind, a brand of cunning that mirrors his own, he is persuaded to take her along.
Crossing the lower Midwest on horseback with little money and few possessions, the four are pursued by a wily private detective after the reward for turning in Riley. He manages to thwart the ragtag group, who abandon their plan of crossing the plains. They slip away by train to Chicago, and there, in that cold, stinking, dangerous metropolis, just before the 1864 election, they meet with problems beyond Riley’s ability to resolve. All four find themselves alone, at the mercy of fortune . . . and the fortune hunter, who finally gets the chance to face down his nemesis.
Deserters alternates between the perspectives of the four major characters as their relationships grow and shift, and as each of them strives to forge their way forward in the late war’s murky upheaval. A book whose antecedents include Charles Portis’s True Grit and Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, Gabriel’s immersive novel is an adventure story with psychological intricacy, emotional intensity, and historical heft.
Purchase Deserters from the University of Chicago Press, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Bookshop.
Drowned Boy: Stories (Sarabande Books, 2010)
Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In "Boys Industrial School," two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment—set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.
"These [stories] are rust-belt blues, then, a vision of and lament for a past time and a swiftly changing place. They're not showy—the language is plain, the tragedy muted, the comedy low-key and wry—but they stick in the mind. Ray Carver would recognize these characters and situations, as would poet Philip Levine. I like to think that they would share my appreciation for this fine first book, built slowly and carefully over some years, and worth the wait."
—Andrea Barrett, author of Voyage of the Narwhal
Purchase Drowned Boy from Sarabande Books, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or Bookshop.
The Let Go: Stories (Queens Ferry Press, 2015)
The people who inhabit Jerry Gabriel’s second collection of stories, The Let Go, strain against their historical moments. A poacher’s daughter, a disgraced vet, an out–of–work temp, a professor, a middle–school basketball ace: these are the Great Let Go in whose embattled existence we feel the impact of war, financial crises, and the many lesser perils that attend life. With equal measures of tenderness, ruthlessness, and humor, Gabriel illuminates an Ohio landscape—its cities, suburbs, and countryside—fraught with economic disparity, its characters facing their dilemmas with grief, with anger, but always exhibiting a surprising fortitude. In these seven taut stories, Gabriel writes hardship as a site of hope.
“Like Alice Munro’s stories, these wonderful stories by Jerry Gabriel often have the scope of novels. They take a particular interest in characters who are just barely hanging on and who fear ‘The Let Go’: the day when they will be laid off. The stories have great urgency and momentum and carry you headlong through to the end. The Let Go is one of the best books of short fiction that I’ve read in the last few years.” —Charles Baxter, author of There’s Something I Want You to Do
“An enormous heart pulses through every page, every line of The Let Go, a collection of stories somehow diverse enough to include poachers, roofers, scientists, dropouts, basketball stars, war vets, office workers, and accidental factory owners, all of them full of longing for something they can’’t quite name. With his careful attention to their rich interior lives, it’s obvious Jerry Gabriel loves every one of his characters for exactly who they are, and you will too. The Let Go is a work of great literature.” —Matt Burgess, author of Uncle Janice
Purchase The Let Go from Amazon.