A Place Called Winter

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455594067
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
"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 Moyes A 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 signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the golden suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before. In this exquisite journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. This is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.

Take Nothing With You

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Tinder Press
ISBN: 1472205367
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
'Absolutely one of his best - a wonderful, wonderful read' Stephen Fry 'Funny and heartfelt' Spectator From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes a compassionate, compelling new novel of boyhood, coming of age, and the confusions of desire and reality. 'An incredibly beautiful story told with compassion. Nothing is wasted. Each sentence is beautifully crafted' Joanna Cannon 1970s Weston-Super-Mare and ten-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice. Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives. 'It's delicious, it's dear, it's heart-breaking and very funny' Rachel Joyce 'Suffused with the joy and wisdom of Gale's mid-life reconnection with music' Guardian 'Gale is excellent on the hot, messy nature of self-discovery and sexual awakening' Daily Mail 'Generously optimistic. It shows how our past shapes us, but suggests that we can make something from the emotional burdens that we bear' Telegraph What readers love about TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU: 'This is a beautifully written novel, simple to read but so humane and warm' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'As with all his books you feel you are reading about someone you know intimately such is his amazing characterisation. Read this book and feel totally fulfilled' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'This is a warming tale of a younger and later an old man overcoming adversity through his innate goodness, humour and optimism' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Gale is a wonderful writer. His description of the Schubert string quintet rehearsals perfectly described the slow movement. I'd been searching for that music for a few years. This story is brilliant on so many fronts' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'A very beautiful novel of love, friendship and the cello' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

A Perfectly Good Man

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504036522
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The bestselling British novel about love, marriage, family, secrets, and how the power of faith can transform lives even in the midst of inconsolable loss After being paralyzed in a rugby accident, twenty-year-old, wheelchair-bound Lenny Barnes feels he has nothing left to live for and is putting his affairs in order before committing suicide. As lively Mazey Day celebrations take place in the Cornish town of Penzance, Lenny summons a parish priest to his home. Father Barnaby Johnson is shocked to discover that he has been called in not to comfort but to deliver last rites. Lenny’s death will reverberate not only in Barnaby’s life but in the lives of his family and those around them, from Barnaby’s wife, Dorothy, to Modest Carlsson, a parishioner and former teacher whose affair with an underage student cost him his job, his marriage, and, quite possibly, his soul. Narrated in a nonlinear style from the characters’ shifting perspectives and ages, this spellbinding, exquisitely crafted novel exposes the fault lines in relationships as it limns the consequences of our actions. The novel that author Patrick Gale describes as “an echo chamber” to his international bestseller Notes from an Exhibition, A Perfectly Good Man reveals another family in crisis and asks what it truly means to be good. This Richard & Judy Book Club pick is a story of warmth, wisdom, and compassion on crises of faith, the power of prayer, morality, and what it means to be a parent.

Flyaway

Author: Lucy Christopher
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 0545317711
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
While her father is in the hospital, 13-year-old Isla befriends Harry, the first boy to understand her love of the outdoors, and as Harry's health fails, Isla tries to help both him and the lone swan they see, struggling to fly, on the lake outside Harry's window.

The Cat Sanctuary

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007307683
Category : Cornwall (England : County)
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
A powerful and moving novel in which Patrick Gale casts a compassionate yet satirically sharp eye over the pains and abuses inflicted by families, friends and lovers. Judith and Deborah are sisters driven apart by traumatic events in their childhood, but thrown back together again when Deborah's diplomat husband is accidentally assassinated. Judith's lover, Joanna, the instigator of this awkward reunion, finds that as the sisters' murky past is raked up, so too is her own, and the three women become embroiled in a tangle of passion and recrimination.

The Story of Alice

Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674970764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Book Description
Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll’s imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland. It also explains why Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why, a century and a half later, they continue to enthrall and delight readers of all ages. The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist, entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they are. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell’s death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll’s books and other works of Victorian literature. In the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era, Douglas-Fairhurst shows, Wonderland became a sheltered world apart, where the line between the actual and the possible was continually blurred.

A God in Ruins

Author: Kate Atkinson
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 031634155X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
This stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn), follows Ursula's brother Teddy as he navigates an unknown future after a perilous war. "He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future." Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances and the power of choices, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century over and over again. A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th Century through Ursula's beloved younger brother Teddy -- would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather -- as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have. An ingenious and moving exploration of one ordinary man's path through extraordinary times, A God in Ruins proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age.

A God in Every Stone

Author: Kamila Shamsie
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408847213
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A stunning new novel from the Granta Best of Young British, Orange shortlisted author of Burnt Shadows

Notes from an Exhibition

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472255372
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
'Poised and pitch-perfect throughout' Mail on Sunday Set in Cornwall, the bestselling novel of artistic compulsion, marriage, and the secrets left behind. 'This book is complete perfection' Stephen Fry Celebrated artist Rachel Kelly dies alone in her Penzance studio, after decades of struggling with the creative highs and devastating lows that have coloured her life. Her family gathers, each of them searching for answers. They reflect on lives shaped by the enigmatic Rachel - as artist, wife and mother - and on the ambiguous legacies she leaves them, of talent, torment and transcendent love. 'An uplifting, immensely empathetic novel' Guardian What readers love about NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION: ' A shifting, multi-layered, beautifully textured portrait of not-quite ordinary family life' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'The word that shimmers with me is empathy. Gale has such a sensitive understanding of how minds and hearts work and react on one another amid the chaos and sometimes intense joys of real living' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'I loved the exhibition-style notes at the beginning of each chapter, which heralded a hint of the chapter's contents. Beautifully woven back and forth in time to reveal the complexities of fascinating family members and their relationships' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Divided Kingdom

Author: Rupert Thomson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408833131
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
It is winter, somewhere in the United Kingdom, and an eight-year-old boy is removed from his home and family in the middle of the night. He learns that he is the victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each representing a different personality type. The land, too, has been divided into quarters. Borders have been established, reinforced by concrete walls, armed guards and rolls of razor wire. Plunged headlong into this brave new world, the boy tries to make the best of things, unaware that ahead of him lies a truly explosive moment, a revelation that will challenge everything he believes in and will, in the end, put his very life in jeopardy ...