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Tree Surgery for Beginners

Page 27

by Patrick Gale


  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

  Facts of Life

  Patrick Gale

  A young composer, Edward Pepper, is exiled from his native Germany by the war, struck down with TB, and left to languish in an isolation hospital. But then he falls in love with his doctor, Sally Banks, and his world is transformed. They set up home in a bizarre dodecahedral folly, The Roundel – a potent place, which grows in significance as it bears witness to their family’s tragedies and joys. The years pass, and Edward watches from this sanctuary as both his grandchildren, Jamie and Alison, fall prey to the charms of Sam, an enigmatic builder, and have to come to terms with some of the tougher facts of life.

  Buy the ebook here

  Rough Music

  Patrick Gale

  Julian is enjoying the perfect childhood holiday on a Cornish beach when glamorous American cousins arrive unexpectedly to swell the party. Emotions soon run high and events spiral out of control, with tragic consequences. Though he has been brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, and though his parents are neither as normal nor as happy as he supposes, Julian’s world view is the sunnily selfish, accepting one of boyhood. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.

  This is a remarkable, wholly recognizable story of the lies which adults tell, and of the little acts of treason which a child can commit, a compassionate portrayal of the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.

  Buy the ebook here

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Heartfelt thanks to Susan Boyd and Glenda Bailey for the country and western cruise,

  to Charlotte Windsor and Philip Gwyn Jones for bearing with me,

  to Armistead Maupin, Terry Anderson, Peter Gadol and Stephen Gutwillig for showing me California,

  to all those patient bridge partners,

  and to my mother, whose cuttings and counsel helped me start a garden of my own.

  Cornwall, 18 September 1996

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PATRICK GALE was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, he has published a biography of Armistead Maupin, a short history of the Dorchester Hotel and chapters on Mozart’s piano and mechanical music for H.C. Robbin Landon’s The Mozart Compendium. His most recent novel is The Whole Day Through. His new collection of short stories, Gentleman’s Relish, is published this year.

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Aerodynamics of Pork

  Kansas in August

  Ease

  Facing the Tank

  Little Bits of Baby

  The Cat Sanctuary

  Caesar’s Wife

  The Facts of Life

  Dangerous Pleasures

  Rough Music

  A Sweet Obscurity Friendly Fire

  Notes from an Exhibition

  The Whole Day Through

  Gentleman’s Relish

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1 Auckland,

  New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

 

 

 
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