Imprisonment for a crime you didn’t commit gives you time to think…

In his forties, Galen Melville, openly gay, emerges from prison in the mid-1990s, exonerated from a crime he did not commit. Galen returns to the idyllic landscape of his hometown and the eccentric Vondel hotel run by his quirky Dutch family. Suddenly he discovers that perhaps the ghost of his beloved uncle is afoot in the bequeathed mansion across the street. He also hooks up with two muscular and beautiful men, Anton, the landscaper, and Brent, the physical therapist, one older and one younger. He also fights to establish his uncle’s mansion as a refuge for gay and lesbian people. This sensually evoked, affirmative, often comic, sometimes sexually graphic novel follows Galen through a slowly evolving pastoral world, made vivid in riveting prose, a world where his mother finds a renewed sense of her poetic vocation. His father finds sobriety, and his older lover discovers his roots and liberation from the closet.

Praise for Henry Alley and Galen’s Legacy

“Henry Alley is an excellent writer. His fiction is artfully artless, clear, concise, and real. Best of all, he regularly tells stories that nobody else is telling.”
—Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters

“Like Edmund White and Christopher Isherwood, Alley displays an exacting use of language, an instinct for just the right word. Precise, yes, but with those choices he builds lush backgrounds, compelling characters, and a rich narrative. A narrative and characters who show us, once again, that now and in the near past, there was a full and meaningful life for gay men outside of life in cities such as New York and San Francisco. This life might have looked different at times, but it burned no less brightly. In this novel as in every piece he writes, Alley grows as a writer and brings fresh eyes to familiar and timely themes of manhood and its difficult choices and all too human flaws.”
—John Francis Leonard, contributing writer and arts critic, A&U Magazine

“In Galen’s Legacy, Henry Alley has fashioned a nuanced portrait of an unforgettable character–a wrongly incarcerated, proudly out gay man struggling upon release from prison to make peace with his past, revive family relationships, nurture romance, and liberate his closeted self-respect. A moving and insightful read.“
—Daniel M. Jaffe, author of The Grand Sex Tour Murders

“Henry Alley’s big strength is his characters, and none are more complex than Galen Melville, wrongly incarcerated and just out of prison. His attempts to get his life back on track are richly detailed and populated with equally interesting acquaintances. Well-observed and finely wrought, this story of a life in transition is bound to interest both those in flux and those who have settled down.”
—Jerry L. Wheeler, Lambda Literary Award finalist and author of Pangs