A Place Called Winter: Costa Shortlisted 2015

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Tinder Press
ISBN: 1472205324
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
** Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2015 ** To find yourself, sometimes you must lose everything. Discover it all in A PLACE CALLED WINTER - picked for the BBC Radio 2 Simon Mayo Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club A shy but privileged elder son, 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 force him to abandon his wife and child and sign up for emigration to Canada. 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 and madness that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before.

The Cat Sanctuary

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504037642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
Bestselling British author Patrick Gale casts an empathetic and ferocious eye on the domestic wounds inflicted by families and lovers in this dark comedy. One minute Deborah Curtis’s husband, Julian, is alive, a handsome figure leaving their rented house in an African principality, kissing his wife goodbye in the early morning sunshine. The next moment he’s dead, the ground shaking in the aftermath of a deafening explosion. Months later, Deborah is still recovering from the assassination of her spouse and the collateral damage to her own body and soul. Bestselling author Judith Lamb is living with her partner of eight years in an isolated farmhouse on the Cornish moors, struggling with her latest novel. Her American lover, the tall, statuesque Joanna Verdura, is currently on assignment in Seneca. After reading about a diplomat killed by a car bomb meant for someone else, Joanna feels a strong compulsion to visit the dead man’s widow. After all, Deborah is Judith’s younger sister. Although she has been estranged from Judith for years, Deborah doesn’t resist when Joanna whisks her off to Cornwall to grieve in peace, far from the political spotlight. But Joanna has unleashed a demon: the sisters’ buried past. As old unresolved wounds bleed into the present, a history of abuse comes to light. Forced to confront painful memories, the women’s secrets and lies collide in a shattering, unbearably moving climax in a cat sanctuary. From the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition, told in the very different voices of its three female characters, The Cat Sanctuary is an ultimately redemptive tale about family and forgiveness and the love and steadfast devotion needed to find grace.

Take Nothing With You

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472205367
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
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. 'It's delicious, it's dear, it's heart-breaking and very funny' Rachel Joyce '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.

The Whole Day Through

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504036565
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
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 with married men, her adult life “mapped out in relationships not achievements.” She leaves Paris to return to England, determined to keep her osteoporosis-stricken mother from the indignities of an institution by caring for her at home. At a hospital in historic Winchester, Laura runs into her former love. A onetime HIV consultant, Ben has also come home to be a caregiver to his gay younger brother with mosaic Down syndrome. Ben is now married to Chloe, a former model he doesn’t love. In spite of the obstacles against them, Laura and Ben rekindle their affair. The Whole Day Through takes place over twenty-four hours, while simultaneously spanning decades to tell Laura and Ben’s story. As the narrative threads move inexorably toward each other, past and present merge in a haunting collage of memory, mortality, missed chances, and the obligations and regrets of love. This novel from the bestselling British author of Notes from an Exhibition was a Sainsbury’s Book Club pick in the UK.

Notes from an Exhibition

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504036557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Four siblings discover truths about their late mother, a troubled artist—and themselves—in this “uplifting, immensely empathetic novel” (The Guardian). Gifted painter Rachel Kelly lived a life of manic highs and suicidal lows. Her husband, a gentle, devout Quaker, gave her a safe haven where she could create and be herself, but her mental illness still took its toll on her family. Now, after a fatal heart attack, a retrospective of Rachel’s work attracts art lovers who marvel at her skill, but her grown children are busy coping with the shattering effects of her death—and her life. Her eldest son has been bequeathed a letter that shakes him to his core. Another son reflects on the years he spent trying not to upset his mother’s delicate equilibrium while negotiating his own relationship with his lover. The youngest son was much beloved by Rachel, for reasons not everyone knows. And Rachel’s only daughter seems to have inherited her talent—but also her demons. Set against the wild and beautiful landscape of Cornwall, this novel by the acclaimed author of A Place Called Winter and A Perfectly Good Man shifts back and forth in time and place as it moves effortlessly between characters, offering a revealing window into the symbiotic relationship between genius and mental illness and the effects both have on maternal love and the creation of enduring art. In the words of Armistead Maupin, “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.”

A God in Ruins

Author: Kate Atkinson
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 031634155X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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 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.

Mother's Boy

Author: Patrick Gale
Publisher: Tinder Press
ISBN: 1472257405
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
'Tender, evocative' TLS 'Richly engaging' Spectator A Radio 4 Serial Fiction Book of the Week 'A characteristically tender novel about a young man growing up in the shadow of one war and the whispers of the next' Observer 'A wonderful novel about relationships, particularly between a mother and son. A compelling read, beautifully crafted and sensitively written' Irish Examiner _______ Laura, a laundress, meets her young husband when they are both placed in service in Teignmouth in 1914. They have a baby, Charles, but his father returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave Laura a widow. As a new war looms, Charles signs up for the navy as a coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to a more colourful life in action sees him blossom, as he experiences the possibility of death, and the excitement - even terror - of a love that is as clandestine as his work. _______ 'Stands with the best queer literary fiction of a historical bent, illuminated as it is by Gale's devilish wit and talent for both social observation and intricacies of character' Sydney Morning Herald 'A wonderful novel - a touching, utterly convincing portrait of the nascent artist' Mail on Sunday 'A deeply moving novel. The portrait of a complex relationship that constricted as much as it sustained is brilliantly done' The Tablet

A God in Every Stone

Author: Kamila Shamsie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632864177
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
In the summer of 1914 a young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, joins an archaeological dig in Turkey, fulfilling a long-held dream. Working alongside Germans and Turks, she falls in love with archaeologist Tahsin Bey and joins him in his quest to find an ancient silver circlet. But the outbreak of war in Europe brings her idyllic summer to a sudden end, and her new friends become her nation's enemies. Thousands of miles away, twenty-year-old Pathan Qayyum Gul is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army. When he loses an eye in battle and is sent to England to recuperate, his allegiances falter. Returning home at last, Qayyum shares a train carriage with Vivian Rose, whose continued search for the circlet has led her to Peshawar in the heart of the British Raj. Many years later, the two cross paths again, and their loyalties will be tested once more amidst massacres, cover-ups, and the disappearance of a young man they both love.