by Patrick Gale
As the full import of the second announcement sank in, Seth rinsed out his bowl at the tap and began to feel more of a birthday boy. He looked around and saw that Venetia had returned to the garden. She was fighting with a deckchair. He heard Mother’s voice from the opening music room door.
‘Are you quite sure you won’t stay for a cup of coffee, or something, Officer?’ She walked to the front door with the policewoman.
‘No thanks, all the same, Mrs Peake. I just wanted to be the one to tell you myself. I’ve got to be hurrying back now.’ Seth walked to the doorway to look. ‘Morning,’ said Mo, with a smile. He nodded in reply, then went to cut some bread.
‘Oh well, thank you for being so considerate,’ said Mother.
‘My pleasure.’
Mother shut the door and walked smartly over to the kitchen. Seth looked up from the toaster. She was talking brightly and fast.
‘Happy Birthday, darling!’ she sang, and planted a warm kiss on his forehead. ‘What did she want?’
‘Oh, wasn’t she funny? She was a real Cockney. She’d come all the way from London to tell me. And did you see that scar? Quite awe-inspiring!’ She laughed unexpectedly, ‘Oh my God! You didn’t think I’d called the Fuzz to set them on your new sculptor friend? Really Seth, how could you forget my keenness to patronize the Arts?’
As she heard herself babbling on the brink, the newly-widowed mother of two was surprised that she could not begin to tell them.
Have you read…?
Notes From An Exhibition
Patrick Gale
When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.
A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons…Only their father’s Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.
The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.
Patrick Gale’s latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.
Buy the ebook here
A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale
‘Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’
‘I’m going to die.’
We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’
‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.
When 20–year–old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much–loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy’s reverberations open up the fault–lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. The personal stories of his wife, children and lover illuminate Barnaby’s ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this web of relations scuttles Barnaby’s repellent nemesis – a man as wicked as his prey is virtuous.
Returning us to the rugged Cornish landscape of Notes from an Exhibition, Patrick Gale lays bare the lives and the thoughts of a whole community and asks us: what does it mean to be good?
Buy the ebook here
The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale
When forty–something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days – and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional touchstone against which she has judged every man since. She’s cautious – and he’s married – but they can’t deny that feelings still exist between them.
Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing?
Taking its structure from the events of a single summer’s day, The Whole Day Through is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing.
The Whole Day Through is vintage Gale, displaying the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller Notes From an Exhibition.
Buy the ebook here
Tree Surgery For Beginners
Patrick Gale
Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother’s life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. While he is straightforward, honest, and a doting dad, he can be a difficult, taciturn husband – but he’s the last person one would suspect of being a killer.
Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife–beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind.
Buy the ebook here
Dangerous Pleasures
Patrick Gale
The subjects are wide–ranging and various – curious childhood loyalties, long–hidden memories, newly discovered joys, startling secrets, dislocated relationships, overwhelming, thrilling passions.
In prose which is vivid and fresh, Patrick Gale explores the subtle boundaries that shift between the fantastic and shockingly real. With characteristic insight and wit and with consummate ease, he draws the reader into lives both familiar and strange, revealing a world that shines with possibilities and will never fail to delight.
Buy the ebook here
About the Author
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy in Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End.
Also by Patrick Gale
KANSAS IN AUGUST
EASE
FACING THE TANK
LITTLE BITS OF BABY
THE CAT SANCTUARY
CAESAR’S WIFE (NOVELLA)
THE FACTS OF LIFE
DANGEROUS PLEASURES (STORIES)
TREE SURGERY FOR BEGINNERS
ROUGH MUSIC
About the Publisher
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New Zealand
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United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
