A literary historical novel following one damaged harmonica across a century of war, exile, migration, music and repair.
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.