'Miraculous, mischievous and quietly devastating' Rachel Joyce'A tender, delicately devastating novel' Sarah Waters' An engulfing, deeply humane novel about the triumphs and failures of human connection' Marina KempA journey. A reunion. A longing for a place called home...When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane sails home to an England transf...

"Patrick Gale has written a book which manages to be both tender and epic, and carries the unmistakable tang of a true story. I loved it." -- Jojo MoyesA privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything.Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry si...

Love—common and uncommon, vengeful and transformational—is the theme of this superb collection from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition.From subtle tales of domestic unease to a story featuring a caravan that transports three generations of a family away from their small-town lives, author Patrick Gale proves in his second story collection that he is a master at mining the loneliness, yearning, and eternal optimism of the human spirit.

Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, Rough Music is a novel of one family at two defining points in time. Seamlessly alternating between the present day and a summer thirty years past, its twin stories unfold at a cottage along the eastern coast of England.Will Pagett receives an unexpected gift on his fortieth birthday, two weeks at a perfect beach house in Cornwall. Seeking some distance from the married man with whom he's having an affair, he invites his aging mother an...

Patrick Gale's perennially popular debut novel takes a wry and romantic look at love both in and out of the closet.At fifteen years and eleven months, violinist Seth Peake is a musical prodigy who's secretly attracted to men. Scheduled to begin music college in the fall, he is en route to Cornwall to spend the summer at the Trenellion Festival, a pacifist festival of art and music his family helped to found. There he falls head over heels for a gorgeous, unsuitable...

Three keenly observant and profoundly moving novels from an international bestselling British writer "with heart, soul, and a dark and a naughty wit" ( The Observer)."Patrick Gale writes with the understated fluency that is the hallmark of contemporary British fiction, and with the irony that usually accompanies it." In the three novels collected here, the author of the international bestseller Notes from an Exhibition explores the complexities an...

Eleven electric stories of lost women, gay men, curious children, and nostalgic adults from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition.A woman tries on a wig and it unlocks a side of herself she never knew existed. Visiting his old boarding school, a man is nearly undone by memories of a romantic encounter with a former classmate. When she introduces her girlfriend to her family, a young woman is shocked by her mother's all-too-welcoming reaction. T...

Bestselling author Patrick Gale's quirky and hilarious novel of English country life is "a ridiculously crazy tour de force" ( Publishers Weekly).The town of Barrowcester—pronounced "Brewster"—is English as can be. From its cozy little pubs to its immaculate cathedral close, the quiet city seems straight out of the pages of Thomas Hardy. For American academic Evan Kirby, it's paradise, a welcome escape from the United States, where he was haunted by the gri...

Two family novels from an international bestselling British writer "with heart, soul, and a dark and a naughty wit" ( The Observer).Armistead Maupin says of Patrick Gale: "Few writers have grasped the twisted dynamics of family the way Gale has. There's really no one he can't inhabit, understand, and forgive." In both novels presented in this collection, Gale explores the complex dynamics of family with dead-on observation and generous compassion.

This bestselling bittersweet story of love and second chances takes place over the course of a single summer day . . . or does it?The only child of eccentric academics who never married, Laura Lewis was an undergrad at Oxford when she met Ben Patterson. They shared an idyllic few months of passion, only to go their separate ways when Ben ended their relationship.Two decades later, Laura is a self-employed accountant with a history of unfulfilling liaisons w...

Bestselling British author Patrick Gale chronicles the misadventures of a misfit tree surgeon in this "modern-day myth of self-discovery" ( The Guardian).It was in the ancient cathedral city of Barrowcester that eight-year-old Lawrence Frost began his love affair with the trees that had "sprung up on the site of an ancient plague grave and unconsecrated resting place for the city's outcasts." And it is there that the thirty-two-year-old forester and arbori...

Three irreverent comic novels from an international bestselling British writer "with heart, soul, and a dark and a naughty wit" ( The Observer)."A clever, original writer with a sharp eye for social comedy and an equally sharp ear for dialogue," Patrick Gale is able to find the comic irony as well as the all-too-human drama in our foibles. In his first three novels, collected here, he mines a rich vein of comedy in characters such as a playwright who reinv...