Jon Brandow’s Goliath at Sunset Brings the American Shipyard — and Its Tensions — to Life
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Asia Tabb
AIRED; January 30, 2026
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For author Jon Brandow, Goliath at Sunset didn’t begin as a novel. It began as lived experience.
Brandow spent nine years as a welder and rank-and-file union activist in a Boston-area shipyard — a job and a place that would leave a lasting imprint, even if it took decades for the story to fully emerge.
“Not until after I got out,” Brandow said, when asked when he realized there was a novel there. “The whole experience was tremendously full of impact for me as it was happening, but probably too raw in many ways to think about for several years afterwards.”
It wasn’t until around 2008 that Brandow began jotting down notes. Then life intervened. He put the work away for more than a decade, returning to it only after selling his business and retiring about five years ago.
The result is Goliath at Sunset, a literary fiction novel deeply rooted in working-class life, union culture, and the racial and social tensions that defined Boston in the 1970s and 80s. While Brandow did some historical research — particularly around shipyard unionization along the East Coast in the 1940s — he says most of the book draws directly from lived experience.
“Most of the book is inspired by real-life experiences that I or other people that I worked with in the shipyard had at the time,” he said.
That authenticity is especially evident in the novel’s language and characters, particularly its central figure, Mike Shea.
Shea is a white kid from the projects of East Cambridge, shaped early by loss, labor, and unlikely solidarity. His mother is killed on a picket line, and one of his most formative memories comes from her funeral.
“The people who came to her aid and who showed up at her funeral were people who worked with her who were largely Cape Verdeans,” Brandow said. “At the funeral, he realized that the people who came back to help his mom were people who didn’t look like him.”
Those moments — along with an openly gay aunt ostracized in the early 1970s, friendships across class lines, service in Vietnam, and witnessing police violence — form Mike Shea’s moral compass. By the time he arrives at the shipyard, he carries a deep awareness of fairness, inequality, and solidarity that sets him apart.
“He brought all that stuff with him to the shipyard,” Brandow said, “and it made him a little bit different than some of the other people that he met there.”
Race, Brandow emphasizes, is not a background detail in the novel — it is central to the story, just as it was to the era.
“Racial tension was what it was all about in Boston in the 70s and 80s,” he said.
The novel is set against the backdrop of Boston’s school busing crisis and the arrival of significant numbers of Black and West Indian workers into previously all-white shipyards through affirmative action programs. Those changes, Brandow said, brought longstanding resentments and prejudices directly into the workplace.
“You had young white welders from South Boston, Charlestown, and Dorchester bringing those conflicts into the shipyard,” he said. “At the same time, for the first time, there were very, very significant numbers of minority workers.”
When asked whether he worried about making readers uncomfortable by confronting these realities head-on, Brandow was blunt.
“Didn’t think about it. Didn’t think about it twice,” he said. “I felt a responsibility to be honest about what I was writing — honest about what I experienced, what I saw, and what people I knew felt and saw.”
That honesty extends to the shipyard’s intensity: the dangerous working conditions, union reform battles, harassment, and discrimination that defined daily life.
“The racial aspect of things in the shipyard was omnipresent,” Brandow said. “It was always right there in front of you.”
In Goliath at Sunset, Brandow doesn’t soften that reality. Instead, he documents it — honoring the people, conflicts, and solidarities that shaped a generation of American workers.
For Brandow, the novel is both remembrance and reckoning — a way of giving voice to stories that lived for decades in weld shops, picket lines, and break rooms before finally finding their way onto the page.
