Tin Sandwich
One harmonica, a hundred years of hands: a novel of what we carry and what carries us.
A harmonica is made in Germany in 1913. One reed is wrong from the start. It should have been rejected. Instead, it is sold, carried to the Western Front, played in the mud near the Somme, and traded away in the last broken months of the First World War.
From there it begins a century-long journey through the hands of scavengers, refugees, lovers, singers, chancers, musicians, soldiers and the people left to live with what history has done to them. By the time Siobhan Brennan finds it in a Liverpool charity shop, the harmonica is no longer merely broken. Its dents, wire, tape, cracked reeds and darkened wood have become a record of everyone who has breathed through it and let it go.
Tin Sandwich is a lyrical, sweeping novel about music, memory and survival — the story of one small instrument, and the lives that pass through it.
Publishes 6 October 2026 · Ebook and paperback · Ebook ISBN 978-1-0668383-9-4 · Paperback ISBN 978-1-0668383-8-7
The harmonica ends up in Liverpool. In Red Dress, a docker's son is still carrying one, and still deciding whether to pass it on.