Press
Jenn’sBookshelves.com on A Place Called Winter
This novel took my breath away. So beautifully written, incredibly captivating from the start, I quickly found myself immersed in Harry’s journey. This epic novel alternates between time periods, from Harry’s youth and adulthood to years later, when Ha …
PortobelloBookBlog on A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale has conveyed exceptionally well how harsh life was for new settlers in this cold, isolated part of Canada. I was so moved reading of Harry’s interaction with his neighbours Paul and Petra Slaymaker from when they first meet, to nursing him …
Savidgereads – Simon Savidge on A Place Called Winter
There are some novels that I read where all I want to do for a review is simply write the words… Read this book. Nothing more, nothing less. However I am aware you need more than those three words to get you to part with your pennies or head to the loc …
Waterford Today on A Place Called Winter
This book is classesd as an epic and in some ways it is, it has most importantly, impossible love, a sweeping sense of time and place as well as larger than life characters. However one thing that it doesn’t have is length. It is a relatively quick rea …
Aberdeen Press and Journal on A Place Called Winter
Epic in scale and subject, Gale effortlessly evokes the grand wild landscapes and Harry’s inner turmoil – and it’s all the more compelling because it’s based on the true story of Gale’s great-grandfather. A deeply touching love story like no other.
The Guardian – Helen Dunmore on A Place Called Winter
Winter, Saskatchewan, is a real place, first settled in 1908. The town grew up around a station named after one of the contractors who built the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which drew European settlers to the Canadian prairies because, under the Domin …
The Welsh Librarian on A Place Called Winter
A Place Called Winter deserves every little bit of advance praise that it has gathered and is a truly exceptional novel. I guarantee you will fall in love with it.
CatherineLarner.com on A Place Called Winter
This is an astonishing book. The characters are so well drawn you feel you’d recognize them if you met them in the street, and you can sense how tired they feel at the end of their day digging the land. The landscape is very real too with the colours, …
ShinyNewBooks.co.uk on A Place Called Winter
A Place Called Winter is a glorious piece of story telling replete with detail anchoring it in time and place: clueless remittance men dispatched to the colonies before they can entirely wreck the family reputation, of whom Harry is emphatically not on …
Jerasjamboree.blogspot.co.uk on A Place Called Winter
The settings come alive – the harshness of his life working for the Jorgensens and then alone in Winter felt very real. The rhythm of his life dictated by the weather pulled me in as did his relationships with his nearest neighbours. I have to say that …
Annethology on A Place Called Winter
A Place Called Winter is a beautifully written and tender novel about one man’s journey to find himself, loosely based on the life of the author’s maternal grandfather. Harry’s anxieties about his sexuality is made more poignant by the reader’s ability …
Grabthisbook.net on A Place Called Winter
I was very fortunate to receive a review copy of A Place Called Winter earlier this year. For the last few weeks I have delighted in seeing the steady stream of support and adulation for Patrick Gale’s extraordinary story. The praise is richly deserved …
Good Housekeeping on A Place Called Winter
A Place Called Winter is a gorgeously written, bittersweet story about secrets and identity.
Heat Magazine on A Place Called Winter
Tender, poignant and utterly enthralling. *****
Sunday Mirror on A Place Called Winter
A convincing and fascinating portrait of daily life over a century ago…utterly heartwrenching.
Metro on A Place Called Winter
A skilful storyteller.
The Sun – S Magazine on A Place Called Winter
Beautifully observed…Gale is not a sentimental writer, he’s vividly aware of hardship and despair, but the overwhelming emotion in this fine book is one of tender, life-affirming joy.
Daily Mail on A Place Called Winter
Lightness of touch, one of Gale’s characters observes, is desirable in a novelist, and it is one of Gale’s virtues…Rich in atmosphere and period detail…this enjoyable tale is both witty and poignant.
Sunday Times on A Place Called Winter
Neatly constructed and written in a prose of beautiful lucidity, Gale’s novel offers up an absorbing and often moving story.
The Times on A Place Called Winter
A mesmerising storyteller; this novel is written with intelligence and warmth.
The Independent – Paul Burston on A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale’s eagerly awaited new novel is a departure in many senses. His first for Tinder Press, his first truly historical novel, it begins in Edwardian England before setting sail for the western prairies of Canada. The opening scene is striking i …
Irish Times – Claire Coughlan on A Place Called Winter
Some novels get under your skin and linger long after the last page has been turned. They are elusive and rare; reading them is like talking to an old friend. The best ones tell us something about ourselves and the way other people are, and they appear …
The Spectator – Charlotte Marsden on A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly …
LonesomeReader.com – Eric Karl Anderson on A Place Called Winter
How would you cope if you were suddenly cast out from your home, family and everything that’s familiar to start a new life from scratch in the wilderness? It’s a terrifying prospect for anyone. This is exactly the position author Patrick Gale’s great g …
Country Life on The Whole Day Through
Laura and Ben are student lovers who meet again some 20-plus years and several responsibilities later in Winchester. Laura has given up Paris to look after her frail, elderly mother; Ben, who is in a flagging, painfully childless marriage, is keeping a …
Country Life on A Perfectly Good Man
In the arresting opening chapter, Father Barnaby, vicar of Pendeen and Morvah near Land’s End, seems half complicit in the suicide of a young man paralysed in a rugby accident. The scene is heartrendingly pertinent to the divisive issue being debated a …
Herald Sun, Australia – Barry Reynolds on A Perfectly Good Man
Fr Barnaby Johnson is taken by surprise when, asked to visit a parishioner confined to a wheelchair after an accident on the rugby field, he becomes a witness to a suicide. This is the shocking introduction to an Anglican parish in Cornwall in Patrick …
The New Zealand Herald – David Hill on A Perfectly Good Man
Lenny is “a perfectly unremarkable 20-year old who just happens to be in a wheelchair”. He’s there because of a rugby accident and he doesn’t want to live any more. So he kills himself, in front of a parish priest. It’s a calm, unflinching, shocking op …
Mattleereviews.blogspot.co.uk on A Perfectly Good Man
I met Patrick Gale many years ago when I worked for Waterstone’s. He was reading from his new book Rough Music. I was on beverage duty, serving drinks from a make-do trolley that thirty minutes previously had been loaded with that months 3 for 2’s. I c …
The Spectator – Charlotte Hobson on A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale’s new novel could be read as a companion work to his hugely successful Notes from an Exhibition, and in fact, in a satisfying twist, some characters and even objects slip from the latter into this novel. Notes from an Exhibition centred ar …
Sydney Morning Herald – Lucy Clark on A Perfectly Good Man
Faith in a novelist you know and admire is a very good thing. It can carry you through what seem like surprising lapses in narrative strength: what appears dull and disjointed surely will find some interest and meaning. Won’t it? Faith in Patrick Gale …
The Observer – Salley Vickers on A Perfectly Good Man
The gentle irony implicit in the title of Patrick Gale’s latest novel sets the tone for the whole book. The familiar phrase exemplifies a peculiarly English irony, implying a quality of goodness that falls far short of perfection and yet, at the same t …
The Independent – Viv Groskop on The Independent – Viv Groskop
This novel gets off to an exceedingly ambitious start. In the opening pages a young man, previously paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide by taking some drugs he has bought over the internet. He makes sure the local priest is with him when it …
The Independent – Jonathan Gibbs on A Perfectly Good Man
There’s a particular strain of English mildness that carries within it a finely wrought undercurrent of viciousness. It’s there in the title of Patrick Gale’s new novel, A Perfectly Good Man, which you could either take literally – that Barnaby Johnson …
The Guardian – Julie Myerson on A Perfectly Good Man
“Please don’t feel you always have to be good,” eight-year-old Barnaby Johnson is advised on what is almost the final page of Patrick Gale’s new novel. “Sometimes you’re so good it hurts to watch you.” Wise words, but in the book – which spans the Corn …
New Books – Guy Pringle on The Whole Day Through
I’m a sucker for books set in real places and since this one takes place in Winchester I have avidly worked out the locations. Better still, the book blindsided me with its ending.
Catholic Herald – Ed West on The Whole Day Through
The cover might make it look like a mixture of chick lit and misery memoir, but this latest work by the respected author is anything but…
Birmingham Sunday Mercury – Diane Parkes on The Whole Day Through
Gale follows up his highly successful Notes From an Exhibition with this close-knit drama of middle-age possibilities and regrets. … Gale’s literary device is to set the entire story in one day filled with flashbacks. In some ways it works very neatl …
Church Times – Sarah Meyrick on The Whole Day Through
Central to the story is what it means to be a carer, and the burden of duty that that presents. The action of the book takes place in the course of a single long June day, punctuated at regular intervals with an almost monastic rhythm. The book is abou …
Daily Express on The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale’s bestselling Notes From an Exhibition is a hard act to follow but he gives it his best shot in The Whole Day Through. At 45 Laura Lewis has abandoned her life in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester. There she accidentally b …
Beige – Peter Burton on The Whole Day Through
It is an enormously engaging story about love regained and love lost and, most of all, acceptance with grace of what life offers.
Cornish World – Pat Quayle on The Whole Day Through
This is another enjoyable and thought-provoking book from a writer who peels the layers from people and situations with great care and compassion. From the opening sentence, the reader is drawn into Laura’s life and needs to know every why and wherefor …
The Independent – Emma Hagestadt on The Whole Day Through
Middle-class melancholia has long been the subject matter of Patrick Gale’s fiction. Here he examines a familiar mid-life dilemma: “Did I make the right choice?” Laura Lewis, an accountant in her forties, has returned to Winchester to care for her elde …
The American Book Center Blog – Em Angevaare on The Whole Day Through
Reading a book by Patrick Gale is like having a long gossipy conversation about people he knows very well. It’s what I like most about his books, the sense that he really cares about his characters and their lives. Gale is never dispassionate. You find …
The Sunday Times – Trevor Lewis on The Whole Day Through
Ben and Laura, the protagonists of Gale’s wistful novel, were once an item at university, until he married somebody else. Having settled into the unglamorous careers of genito-urinary medicine and accountancy respectively, the pair cross paths years la …
She on The Whole Day Through
A bittersweet tale of what happens when you’re torn between duty and desire.
Waterstones Quarterly on The Whole Day Through
Laura and Ben knew the joys of first love when they were students together. When they meet again after a 20-year separation the time that they’ve spent apart seems to fall away. But although their desire for each other is simple, their lives are comple …
The Guardian – Joanna Briscoe on The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale produces finely observed confections with an undertow of trouble that appeal to the chattering classes. Surface pleasures are lightly weighted with issues (disability, sexuality, mental health), while a tendency towards melancholic self-ex …
TheShortReview.com – Sarah Hilary on Gentleman’s Relish
There’s something very comforting about this collection, despite the huge carving knife that gleams from the front cover. Perhaps it’s the title. Gentleman’s Relish is an acquired taste but one I associate with this time of year, with high tea in hotel …
The Guardian – Ben Jeffery on Gentleman’s Relish
This collection of stories from the author of Notes from an Exhibition mixes the mundane and the paranormal. Demonic possession, bloody murder and hauntings share space with disappointing holidays, church tourism and the politics of seat-saving at clas …
The Guardian – Sue Arnold on Gentleman’s Relish
Pascal pinpointed the art of short-story writing when he said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. No one demonstrates this better than Gale, whose thoroughly English stories about dog shows, church concerts, ner …
The Banbury Man on Gentleman’s Relish
Once again, I have discovered a new author, and once again, the genre of short stories (a bit of a necessity for me in these insomniac days) is what I am reading. I found this book in an independent bookshop in Marlborough. The cover intrigued me, and …
Sydney Morning Herald – Helen Elliott on Gentleman’s Relish
Gentleman’s Relish, the title of this collection of stories, suggesting a sort of sly-ish, uppity-ish, silly-ish thing that exists nowhere except in England – hoo-hoos with a very particular Englishness. And isn’t there an embedded mild-ish dirty joke …
The Times – Carol Ann Duffy on Gentleman’s Relish
The short story as a form has been enjoying a considerable renaissance and Patrick Gale offers sixteen new stories in Gentleman’s Relish. Dark, witty and often obliquely moving, these are tales of difficult fathers and gay sons, of lonely wives and ran …
Times Literary Supplement – Sarah Curtis on Gentleman’s Relish
Patrick Gale’s interests soon become plain in Gentleman’s Relish, his new collection of sixteen short stories. The first tale, The Lesson, shows his detailed knowledge of the staff side of prisons in its sympathetic depiction of the loneliness of a pri …
Daily Mail – Carla McKay on Gentleman’s Relish
Gale writes with such humanity and warmth in his novels that it comes as a surprise that his short stories are told in a different, darker voice. A man wreaks nasty vengeance on his father when he’s too old and incapacitated to retaliate; two gay ‘chur …
Waterstones Quarterly on Gentleman’s Relish
The short story has long been close to Gale’s heart and this new collection bears all the hallmarks of his acclaimed novels. From the joys and sorrows of family relationships to the thorny politics of village life, these stories are all written with Ga …
Daily Express – Peter Burton on Gentleman’s Relish
Patrick Gale is a writer highly regarded for a series of touchingly compassionate novels about complicated human relationships. He has described his most recent book, The Whole Day Through, published earlier this year, as “a bittersweet love story in t …
The Independent – Richard Canning on Gentleman’s Relish
This is Gale’s sixteenth book of fiction, and second collection of stories, following 1996’s Dangerous Pleasures. For his longstanding fan base, as well as recent converts through the Richard and Judy-featured novel Notes from an Exhibition (2007) and …
The Times – Kate Saunders on Gentleman’s Relish
The short-story form suits Gale’s ability to zoom in on the smallest nuances of a relationship. In the title story of this collection a father frets that long years of breadwinning have separated him from his children. His youngest son has become myste …
Metro on Gentleman’s Relish
Although he has been writing consistently since 1985, Patrick Gale only jumped from being a cultish author to an overnight sensation in 2007 with Notes From An Exhibition, a Richard and Judy choice and, therefore, a tearaway bestseller. Gentleman’s Rel …
review 283 on A Perfectly Good Man
Weekly Alibi, US on Tree Surgery for Beginners
You’re in for a ride with this one. You might find yourself laughing out loud. I certainly did.
The New York Times on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Patrick Gale takes up the elements of the 18th century comic novel – abandoned babies, characters in disguise, the wanderings of a feckless youth – and recombines them into an elegant romance that manages to be both playful and wise. In prose of sparkl …
Gay Times – Colin Spencer on Tree Surgery for Beginners
A fascinating novel which tackles all the big themes of life in an unexpectedly quiet manner, but with such enormous competence that it left me much moved and full of admiration. The narration keeps one in a constant state of surprise, while the psycho …
The List on Tree Surgery for Beginners
The darkest moments are unputdownable.
Aberdeen Dress and Journal on Tree Surgery for Beginners
I was delighted to get my hands on this paperback. Gale is a born story-teller, with the vivid imagination to match. What starts as a comic thriller keeping readers very much on the edge becomes more and more of a poignant tragedy as the plot unravels. …
L A Times on Tree Surgery for Beginners
The real horror in this thriller lies in the ways mistakes in love continue to unravel lives down through generations. Don’t be deceived by the title: this is one scary book.
The Times on Tree Surgery for Beginners
A readable, entertaining and occasionally moving yarn.
Daily Telegraph on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale’s energetic novel is a carnival of events in which credible characters find themselves in incredible situations.
Sunday Telegraph on Tree Surgery for Beginners
The book is one of his best: a fluently constructed narrative underpinned by excellent characterisation. Running through it all is the theme of redemption; and the hero’s journey from despair to hope makes a stirring odyssey for the reader.
Sydney Morning Herald on Tree Surgery for Beginners
With his interest in manners and class, his delicate observations of the intimacies of loving and dying and especially in his invention of a town called Barrowcester, Gale and Joanna Trollope map a similar terrain. Artifice abounds, so does wit, and my …
Outrage on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale’s characters are put through the meat grinder of love: pushed to do bad things, punished by a course of harrowing exercises and redeemed only after they have earned it.
The Bulletin, Australia on Tree Surgery for Beginners
This is a sympathetic, gripping and cleverly crafted novel. I remained captivated.
Financial Review Magazine, Australia on Tree Surgery for Beginners
This is a witty and highly entertaining journey. Gale uses the conventional narrative as a launching pad, weaving in exotic Caribbean diversions, transsexuals, tigers and a bracing infusion of sex and violence.
The Australian on Tree Surgery for Beginners
New Age America is grafted onto staid rural England, calypso onto Elgar, farce onto realism. Gale finds the dark side devilishly alluring and he has a great talent for contrivance. He especially likes to probe the weaknesses that make us vulnerable. Th …
Herald Sun Tribune on Tree Surgery for Beginners
It is to Gale’s credit that he manages to make a statement about the bonds of familiar love out of this overheated, but never overdone, comedy.
Publisher’s Weekly, US on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale’s novel repays careful reading with its themes of organic growth, dismemberment and integration, culminating in a healing denouement. Gale’s story develops with such subtlety that the workings of Lawrence’s healing process must be taken on faith. …
Dymock’s Newsletter, Australia on Tree Surgery for Beginners
I know real men don’t cry but I have to admit this one had me pulling out the hankie. The story’s about a man at odds with himself. Sad but true as they say and often funny.
Barbara Gowdy on Tree Surgery for Beginners
In this very fine novel Patrick Gale proves, yet again, that he is both an exceptionally acute observer of human nature and a storyteller of the first order.
Patricia Duncker on Tree Surgery for Beginners
This is vintage Patrick Gale – witty, funny, poignant and utterly absorbing. Nothing is wasted in this novel. It’s a long, hard look at love, sex, violence, and other unconventional family values.
Irish Sunday Tribune on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Patrick Gale writes like a mixture of Joanna Trollope and Mary Wesley. The writing is irritatingly good.
The Guardian on Tree Surgery for Beginners
A modern-day myth of self-discovery, involving transsexual cabaret singers, tigers and long-lost twins. Family is redemptive and romance is not dead in this engaging story.
Time Out on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale’s heady winter brew blows up a storm of sea-changes… A very funny often sad, erudite, eclectic novel writ with style. Terrific.
Glasgow Herald on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale is a good teller of tall tales and proves gloriously catty. The result is a hugely exotic, erotic concoction whose bizarre contents prove a source of continual astonishment as they are revealed… Elegant, witty and terribly tantalising.
Birmingham Post on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Thoroughly entertaining. Rarely, I assume, has a male written better about women. His females are quite outstanding. Lala is a comic creation of the first order and Lawrence’s mother is an exceptionally sensitive portrayal of an ageing beauty.
Gay Scotland on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale weaves a hugely romantic, Austen-esque drama: coincidences, family deceptions, tragedies and affairs abound. The inevitable happy ending is, however, bittersweet. As ever the high points lie with his acutely observed characters: the central charac …
Good Housekeeping on Tree Surgery for Beginners
An absorbing fantasy.
Mail on Sunday on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Exerts the unmistakeable force of a novelist in the process of discovering a new, strong voice. With this alarming and technically very skilful romance, he is decidedly a man to watch.
Daily Telegraph on Tree Surgery for Beginners
The title seems to signal something wildly offbeat and kooky. In fact, what is delightful about Gale’s fiction is that is so warmly and convincingly illuminates ordinary lives and interests. His staples are difficult loves, botched careers, tangled fam …
Scotland on Sunday on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale’s plot operates like a spinning top. Part of Gale’s charm is the ludicrousness of what goes on as an abandoned, emotionally illiterate husband falls for a tall, ageing transsexual…Off-the-wall loners are drawn together by their strangeness as the …
She on Tree Surgery for Beginners
A sublime story of a much-maligned hero more at home with plants than people.
Woman’s Journal on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Don’t miss this corker of a novel in which tree surgeon Lawrence Frost wakes after a night in his van to find himself arrested for murdering his wife. It’s hilarious and sad, packed with crazy coincidences and brilliant set pieces, such as the Caribbea …
The Independent on Tree Surgery for Beginners
His heart-warming novels have amassed him a devoted legion of fans, and even the critics look forward to each new books… Expect the unexpected. That’s the advice given by previews of almost every one of Patrick Gale’s novels… Tree Surgery for Begin …
The Observer on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Gale is at his most insightful in his descriptions of character, both of individuals and of the Frost family as a whole. His heroines are as startlingly believable as his hero, and Lawrence manages to be unforgivable on page one and pitiful enough to b …
The Times on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Geographically, and in its accommodation of a variety of sexual and non sexual relationships, the plot is all over the place. But that’s the point – and one that Gale makes a real virtue of – in an adventurous but confidently handled book, which shows …
Times Literary Supplement on Tree Surgery for Beginners
It is part of the appeal of Gale’s novel that the possibility that his protagonist may be a murderer is treated as dispassionately as the certainty that he married in haste… The title indicates an overarching metaphor, but the image of the family as or …
Sunday Telegraph on Tree Surgery for Beginners
Patrick Gale describes his latest novel as a modern fairy tale. Its literary roots lie in the late plays of Shakespeare. The hero’s violent jealousy links him to Leontes in A Winter’s Tale while his adventures on a storm-tossed island echo The Tempest. …
The Independent on The Facts of Life
A wonderfully readable family saga. Fifties movie stars, waspish dons and wise old women make up the supporting cast in a novel that is as straightforward as it is otherworldly – like reading Iris Murdoch without the puzzles.
Punter What’s On In Sussex on The Facts of Life
Gale’s wit and understanding of character help to fend off any “bonkbuster” atmosphere. He even manages to make the overall tone upbeat and optimistic. The result is a must for all incurable romantics: Mills and Boon with literary cred.
Shepparton News, Australia on The Facts of Life
Gale deals with all manner of human emotions so thoroughly that, although impossible, it seems he has experienced them all himself… The Facts of Life was a magnificent novel, warm and witty and I would have to agree, achingly true and beautiful.
The Times on The Facts of Life
This novel is too deftly characterised, deeply involving and relevant to be dismissed as a saga. A memorable achievement.
Daily Telegraph on The Facts of Life
One associates Gale with small, perfectly formed novels written in gossamer-like prose. Here he has attempted something more like a saga in length and scope. But the quality of the writing is unaffected by the change in tack. It is beautifully done.
The Daily Telegraph on The Facts of Life
It is impossible to put The Facts of Life down. A rural English blockbuster.
Scene on The Facts of Life
Find a deckchair and settle down for a good read.
Oxford Times on The Facts of Life
Although Gale dwells more on the present, his imaginative realisation of 1940s provincial life, quaking from the social aftershocks of war, is remarkably vivid. Throughout, his insight into both male and female experience is Tiresian. Despite the pleth …
Metro News on The Facts of Life
Armistead Maupin teamed up with Joanna Trollope.
Midweek on The Facts of Life
A wonderfully engaging tale, thoughtful, funny, tender and finally very moving.
Scotland on Sunday on The Facts of Life
A subtle, enthralling work, it envelops the bare necessities of living and dying with an evocative sense of social history and prevailing prejudices. Past and present are conveyed with an acute eye for the telling detail while all the characters are dr …
OK Magazine on The Facts of Life
Patrick Gale shows in his sensitive treatment of so many different kinds of love, just how far we’ve progressed towards a kinder way of living – and how far there is to go.
Capital Gay on The Facts of Life
If this all sounds a bit soapish, that is exactly Gale’s intention. For one of the many clever things he does in this novel is to adopt a melodramatic, cinema-style for the Forties, and a faster, television style for the Eighties. In doing this he esch …
The Independent on The Facts of Life
The storytelling is vigorous. Gale is good at piling on the emotion, switching between idyll and upheaval in the manner that has brought best-selling fame to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Catherine Cookson alike.
Marie Claire on The Facts of Life
Brilliant. Vastly readable.
Scene on The Facts of Life
Imbued with a cast of captivating characters, it grippingly explores and demonstrates the elasticity of family ties and the nature of survival.
New Statesman on The Facts of Life
Gale is both a shameless romantic and hip enough to get away with it. His moralised narrative has as its counterpart a rigorous underpinning of craft. This reads, page by page, like a superior gushy blockbuster, but has, as part of its form and subject …
She on The Facts of Life
Patrick Gale chronicles the facts of life that steer a family through three generations in East Anglia. What lends an operatic scale to this superb and often sobering novel are the themes (birth, death, love, creativity) and topical afflictions (the ho …
Time Out on The Facts of Life
Patrick Gale offers us so much more than facts in this extraordinary blockbuster of a novel. Spanning three generations, from the 1940s onwards, it describes a family saga of wide-ranging proportions. Its exploration of family ties and tyranny is encom …
Armistead Maupin on The Facts of Life
A monumental feat of imagination, achingly true and beautiful. I’d be hard pressed to recall the last time a novel so totally captivated me.
Evening Post on The Cat Sanctuary
This is a tranquil black comedy about secrets, about hidden disabilities, about places where you think you’re safe – but where appalling things happen. It makes great reading.
The Courier, Balarat on The Cat Sanctuary
Patrick Gale leads the reader on and on through his minefield of deviance, unhappinesses, weaknesses, relationships in families and their resolutions. It is impossible not to want to know what is to happen along the way, and therein lies its true stren …
The Pink Paper on The Cat Sanctuary
Written in a compulsively readable style, The Cat Sanctuary probes beneath the surface of these womens’ lives and is a disturbing study of child abuse and male violence and sexuality. But the novel’s warmth and humour also make it ultimately an affirma …
Gay Times on The Cat Sanctuary
After reading one of his novels it is possible to return to it whether it is after hours or months and re-open it at random and just start reading again. The novel’s world is re-attainable at a moment’s notice… Sophisticated in its conception and styli …
Times Literary Supplement on The Cat Sanctuary
Much of this is very funny, but that should not obscure the fact that Gale’s comedy is rooted in the acceptance of the inevitability of pain.
Independent on Sunday on The Cat Sanctuary
A powerful and moving novel in which the darkness is often lightened by the author’s deft touches of comedy.
Leeds Other Paper on The Cat Sanctuary
The Cat Sanctuary is a treat to be gobbled greedily. It celebrates the strength of women. It is wonderful that a male writer can present so sympathetic and perceptive a picture.
The Times on The Cat Sanctuary
The Cat Sanctuary is a book with claws. It has a soft surface – a story set in sloping Cornish countryside, touching on love, families and forgiveness, delivered in a gentle, straightforward prose – but from time to time it catches you unawares… Scratc …
The Guardian on The Cat Sanctuary
The itch to give the author a good smacking for some outrageous coincidences and voluptuous flings gives way to admiration for his splendidly realised Cornish moorland setting, wellies, ruts, dripping sheep, hardly a man in sight…Gale’s special forte b …
The Punter on The Cat Sanctuary
Characterised by the wit and compassion Gale’s admirers have come to expect.
The Observer on The Cat Sanctuary
Gale’s novels always catch one a little short with their flaky situations and obliquely deranged behaviour. .. It is only later – when that slippery charm has conveyed its resilience to everyday brutalities never far away – that his books reveal their …
Time Out on The Cat Sanctuary
A dark tale of loss, sex and mistrust… A sensitive, thoughtful novel with a conclusion that is both unsettling and consistent.
Cosmopolitan on The Cat Sanctuary
Full of Freudian nightmares which threaten to overwhelm the ordinary, everyday landscape… Gale’s writing is marvellously entertaining, and there is a compelling sense of biting deep into the core of the bitter truth.
New Woman on The Cat Sanctuary
Like Gale’s previous novels, it’s an elegantly menacing, enjoyable read that starts as it means to go on – dynamically. The Cat Sanctuary presents people’s lives and coiled springs, wound tighter and tighter until suddenly they unleash themselves on th …
Gay Times on The Cat Sanctuary
Wonderful detail of food and landscape and acute observations about the pain that can either drive people apart or help them come together make this a novel of constant change but constant pleasure. Appealing, intelligent, sometimes richly comic, somet …
The Sun Herald on The Cat Sanctuary
Mary Wesley with more brains.
The Daily Telegraph on The Cat Sanctuary
Gale is a charmingly idiosyncratic writer who could not write a cliché if he tried. Spiced with mischievous irony, this engrossing story contains some interesting aperçus on the process of novel writing.
The List on The Cat Sanctuary
Gale unsheathes the most difficult emotions with compelling observation, elegance and charm and, best of all, he knows when to stop.
The Mail on Sunday on Notes from an Exhibition
Poised and pitch-perfect throughout, this is an engrossing portrait of a troubled and remarkable character. A fine writer at the top of his game.
Daily Telegraph, Australia on Notes from an Exhibition
A marvellous novel.
The Sunday Telegraph, Australia on Notes from an Exhibition
Gale writes novels that are like beautiful patchwork quilts; they come folded and every reveal brings new detail and intrigue…
The Sunday Times, Australia – Claire Sutherland on Notes from an Exhibition
Breathtakingly rich and real portrayal of a family, more powerful than any melodrama. Artists from Mozart to Cobain have proved through example that great creativity can come with great despair and torment. But while the world enjoys the fruits of thei …
Sydney Morning Herald – Kerryn Goldsworthy on Notes from an Exhibition
This is one of those novels you’ll always be glad you read; it’s seven hours of ones life well spent. Patrick Gale is an accomplished experienced fiction writer and a seasoned, warm-hearted human being This story of a ‘difficult’ painter and her family …
The Independent – Richard Canning on Notes from an Exhibition
Patrick Gale’s many fans are accustomed to the appearance, every two years or so, of a new novel, each as polished and mellifluous as the last. At the same time, each book takes on a startlingly original tangent, focus and method. Friendly Fire, in 200 …
The Friend – Clare Barnett on Notes from an Exhibition
Needing a new “holiday read” whilst in Cornwall I came across Patrick Gale’s new novel Notes from an Exhibition. Reading the “blurb” on the inside cover I was immediately drawn to the book because the major influence on one of the characters was mentio …
Daily Telegraph – Toby Clements on Notes from an Exhibition
Rachel Kelly is a painter with her best years behind her, living with her grown-up family in Penzance, when she wakes up one morning gripped by an inkling of fresh inspiration and with a lithium pill stuck to her forehead. She has bipolar disorder and, …
The Guardian – Rachel Hore on Notes from an Exhibition
Artist Rachel Kelly’s beloved youngest son, suitably named Petroc, once gave her six stones collected from a Cornish beach, each chosen to represent a member of the family. Rachel treasures these stones and, while engaged on a groundbreaking new series …
The Sunday Times – Adam Lively on Notes from an Exhibition
Patrick Gale’s novel comes with a sticker informing us that it is printed on “100% recycled paper”. The hostile reviewer rubs his hands with glee as he frames sallies about rehashed plot lines and hand-me-down characters. But Notes from an Exhibition d …
Daily Mail – Ross Gilfillan on Notes from an Exhibition
By the time troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies of a heart attack, her glory days are behind her. She leaves an adoring husband, two grown-up sons and a disturbed daughter. She also bequeaths a dark mystery concerning her past. What follows is a beautifu …
Gay Times – Rob Dawson on Notes from an Exhibition
I’ve never been a Gale fan; his writing style is excellent but the subject matter has never engaged me. The synopsis of Notes From an Exhibition left me expecting much of the same, but I was pleasantly surprised… Gale deals with this anxious family w …
TheBookbag.co.uk – John Lloyd on Notes from an Exhibition
If Patrick Gale’s Notes from an Exhibition is not mentioned when the major literary prizes are brought round, I shall be surprised, and a little disappointed. I wasn’t disappointed at all by this mature, clever, artful read.
New Statesman – Hugh Barnes on Notes from an Exhibition
Unhappy families have been a staple of novels since long before Tolstoy wrote the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. His words recur at the beginning of John Lanchester’s wonderful Family Romance, a memoir that is often stranger than fiction, an …
Daily Express – Peter Burton on Notes from an Exhibition
Notes from an Exhibition is a story about family life and the tensions that at once bind it and tear it apart. Patrick Gale’s focus is sharp and this small group of characters is carefully observed and lovingly brought to vivid life…Each chapter of t …
Image Magazine, Ireland on Notes from an Exhibition
This is a book full of insight, intelligence and quiet humour familiar from his previous masterpiece, Rough Music.
The Natal Witness on Little Bits of Baby
The book’s full of sharply observed human surprises and discoveries. Patrick Gale writes with great charm and kindliness, warmth and humour. His message seems to be that love and simplicity can repair even the most chaotic lives and that generosity and …
Gay Times on Little Bits of Baby
Richly anarchic, immensely accomplished and enormously moving, Little Bits of Baby is a real treat.
The Mail on Sunday on Little Bits of Baby
A richly comic novel about the equilibrium of urban lives and loves upset by an outsider. Affectionate and perceptive.
Booklist on Little Bits of Baby
Robin is the catalyst behind a taut series of events that unfolds with the rhythm and control of a good mystery. Every character and setting pulses with charged detail and dramatises the various kinds of love and guilt that grow between parents and chi …
Dare on Little Bits of Baby
One of two public figures with whom, on the basis of their works alone, I would very much like to go to bed…
Daily Mail – Val Hennessy on Little Bits of Baby
Love, death, the decay of friendship, the triumph of love – all the big themes are here in small doses, cunningly plotted and skilfully interwoven by Patrick Gale, who writes like Iris Murdoch on pep pills. … Savage, satirical, often very funny, this h …
She on Little Bits of Baby
This is a witty book with more than a touch of satire, but which deals with love, pain, death and laughter with an extraordinary depth of understanding.
City Limits on Little Bits of Baby
As long as you don’t find a book that makes you laugh and cry unacceptably manipulative, it’s an ideal way to round off a gourmet evening. Delicious.
Sunday Times on Little Bits of Baby
Sharp insights into a thoroughly modern marriage.
Company on Little Bits of Baby
A wonderful modern comedy of manners, neatly crafted and full of compassion for all its most foiblesome cast.
Vogue on Little Bits of Baby
Take a small group of people whose lives are all more or less enmeshed, add a divisive element and watch the ensuing chaos. Iris Murdoch is the doyenne of this technique, but Patrick Gale employs it with considerable success in his fifth novel. His dis …
New York Times on Little Bits of Baby
Savagely gleeful…Gale adroitly keeps the many elements of this barbed farce aloft: his satire is deft, his plot entertainingly stuffed with surprises, and his characters are generally drawn with a laser like attention to their foibles and passions…A …
Boston Sunday Globe – Amanda Heller on Kansas in August
Patrick Gale is a young British novelist of astonishing originality and a steadily darkening vision.This romantic turmoil is mockingly played out against a backdrop not of Shakespearean moonlight and magic but of utmost urban squalor, a setting that gi …
L A Times – Donna Levin on Kansas in August
Gale does for London what Tama Janowitz does for New York and Cyra McFadden did for Marin County… Add to this that Gale turns 26 this year, and it becomes clear that we have a rather daunting talent on our hands.
Publisher’s Weekly, US on Kansas in August
The bawdy narrative strands are cleverly woven together with witty and urbane dialogue and piquant characterisation, so that the reader is thoroughly absorbed in this irreverent tour de force.
Harlan Greene on Kansas in August
Patrick Gale’s Kansas in August is a marvellous entertainment. Part fugue, part farce and part fun-house, it roves from romance to wit from satire to terror. It’s an astonishing accomplishment.
Tribune – Chris Vincent on Kansas in August
The novel seems deliberately light and frothy, so that even potentially serious issues (abandoned babies, racist and homophobic attitudes) are skipped over, and the whole thing ends, rather like one of the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals to which Hilar …
Northern Echo on Kansas in August
Clever and witty.
Literary Review – Gillian Greenwood on Kansas in August
Mr Gale falls between two stools. He writes neither with real satire nor about emotional truth. He is gently witty at times but his comedy lacks edge and the whole effect is bland and rather irritating. I suspect this irritation stems from the suspicio …
Woman’s Journal – Christie Hickman on Kansas in August
A blacker than black comedy that delights on every page.
The Listener – Stephen Fry on Kansas in August
It is clearly my duty as a good citizen to bring this all-singing, all-dancing infant down a peg or two by rubbishing his latest novel. Well I wish I could, but I’m sorry to say that Kansas in August is not a book to be slammed, damned or panned. It is …
London Daily News – Chris Petit on Kansas in August
Gale writes easily on the eye and can mimic answering machines very well. But is this enough?
Gay Times – Peter Burton on Kansas in August
A gripping novel about a particularly bleak, insidiously unpleasant and all too imaginable day after tomorrow, a thoughtful picture of society in decay in smnall ways. This however is but the backdrop for a touching narrative about complex human relati …
The Observer – Maureen Freely on Kansas in August
It is Gale’s best book this year. The writing is more controlled, the characters have more depth, and the silver spoon optimism of his earlier books has given way to the more attractive self-doubt of the mid-twenties over-achiever. But while his blend …
London Evening Standard – D J Taylor on Kansas in August
Mr Gale has one decisive fault as a writer: he tries too hard. He also allows his sub-plots to beguile the reader’s attention. Here the incidental descriptions of Sumitra, a 12-year-old Asian girl who adores Hilary from afar, are a great deal more inte …
City Limits – Paul Hallam on Kansas in August
It’s a short and very funny story, one that could have been developed much more; there is huge potential in the story of a gay man and a baby, their relationship to each other and to the world outide. A little more tension and struggle might have enric …
The Times – John Nicholson on Kansas in August
Despite its title (a dig at the hero’s addiction to Rodgers and Hammerstein) all the action of Kansas in August takes place within a square mile of Shepherd’s Bush Green. However, the ethnic diversity of that area and the sexual versatility of the book …
The Sunday Times – Sophie Harrison on Friendly Fire
Gale has written a classic story of subversion from within which remains reassuringly warm and old-fashioned throughout.
The Independent – Richard Canning on Friendly Fire
It is precisely two years since A Sweet Obscurity – Patrick Gale’s 12th work of fiction. Friendly Fire, populated by a set of familiarly winning adolescents, is somewhat blunter than its predecessor. In the first 300 pages, there isn’t a single fatalit …
Daily Express on Friendly Fire
Friendly Fire is an intense tale of love, life, intellectualism and passion. Inspirational.
Metro – Tina Jackson on Friendly Fire
Patrick Gale’s precise, delicate style in Friendly Fire lends itself well to a story of adolescent turmoil in the hothouse environment of a public school where the narrative, if not the language, is occasionally in danger of becoming overwrought… Emp …
Daily Mail – Amber Pearson on Friendly Fire
Patrick Gale is a writer who has always seemed particularly well-attuned to the assorted agonies and ecstasies of childhood, and while at times Friendly Fire may read like a junior version of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the emotions still ring tr …
Gay Times on Friendly Fire
Gale has crafted an engaging coming-of-age novel, which plays as part regendered autobiography and part classic “English schooldays” book. Audaciously, Gale writes the book from the point of view of a teenage girl – and succeeds with aplomb. A very enj …
The Boston Globe on Facing the Tank
The peculiar title – the entire peculiar novel – has to do with eccentricity raised to an art form, which is also a fair description of Patrick Gale’s disturbing, alluring and idiosyncratic fictional vision.
The Sunday Telegraph on Facing the Tank
Patrick Gale writes with great zest… I kept on reading because I was perpetually astonished to find what Mr Gale had thought up next.
Washington Post on Facing the Tank
If you can imagine a cross of Barchester Towers and Rosemary’s Baby as written by Muriel Spark, you may have some idea of what you’ll be facing with Facing the Tank. There are plenty of good, careful English novelists whose grasp exceeds their reach. G …
Booklist, US on Facing the Tank
Facing the Tank is irresistibly witty satire and a metaphor for all that is assumed to be false yet winds up, inevitably, true.
Publishers’ Weekly, US on Facing the Tank
Gale has carried off yet another ridiculously crazy tour de force… The plot ricochets between the dozens of richly drawn characters, and one of the many reasons to devour this novel at one go is that it will make it easier to keep track. Some other rea …
Times Literary Supplement on Facing the Tank
A commendably intelligent, entertaining and, at times, moving novel.
Punch on Facing the Tank
Facing the Tank is literary. Patrick Gale is a writer who loves words, who loves constructing them into edifices, and who does so with enormous skill. His novel anatomises the cathedral town of Barrowcester and is full of vivid characters and insights. …
Gay Times on Facing the Tank
Gale has created an environment and a credible and predominantly middle-class cast which marry together the macabre tales of M.R. James and the waspish wit of E.F. Benson. But Gale adds to this potent brew an ingredient already evident in his previous …
The Sunday Telegraph on Facing the Tank
Original and amusing. Patrick Gale is an elegant, witty writer with an engagingly bizarre imagination.
The Guardian on Facing the Tank
The first thing that catches the attention about Patrick Gale is a sardonic eye, an engagingly leery way of looking at life, or the half-life he has chosen as his base in Facing the Tank. It’s as though Cold Comfort Farm had called in the interior deco …
The Observer on Facing the Tank
The close world of The Close is tea-cosy warm. But not for long, as Patrick Gale speedily unleashes his merrily black mischief. Suddenly there are rats and worse in belfries, madwomen in every attic. The uncovering of the sadness behind the doilies and …
The Sunday Times on Facing the Tank
Patrick Gale is a mocker. He is intoxicated with words and feeds upon them with a kind of manic relish. But he will not desecrate the thing he mocks. Barrowers may live in a narrow, smug, rich world but they are tough enough to survive shocks with imag …
The Times on Facing the Tank
Mr Gale has established a niche as a purveyor of slick high-campery (and, in this black tale of diabolism in a sleepy cathedral city, High Churchery) which will always command a market.
Today on Facing the Tank
Gale’s fourth novel, set in a cathedral city, seethes with a rich cast of characters.
The Advocate on Facing the Tank
The burden of being human is the difficult process of living everyday life, but the reward – the salvation, as it were – is the transcendence achieved through sexual passion. This odd reversal of Christian dogma is present in all of Gale’s work, but it …
The Advocate on Ease
A study of mismanaged eroticism and misunderstood mysticism.
The Coast Book Review Service, US on Ease
Like his fellow countrymen, Tom Sharpe and John Mortimer, Gale can produce chuckles in waves, all the time getting in stiff jabs beneath the humour. Ease deals with a marvellous assortment of oddballs who live (or at least try to) in a spaced out board …
Wichita Fall Times and Record News on Ease
The plot of Patrick Gale’s novel is almost secondary to what he does best: characterisation. Tilly’s roomers are fascinating people, each with a new and wonderful story and personality twist. The dialogue is strong, witty and captures the Queen’s Engli …
St Louis Post-Despatch on Ease
What makes Ease such a good novel is that the author trusts his story to speak for itself. He does not diminish it by trying to explain too much. Domina has all the sensible modern opinions about abortion, infidelity, divorce, homosexuality, but we rea …
International Herald Tribune on Ease
So off Domina goes to an unprepossessing room in an inelegant neighbourhood where she hopes to get out of her privileged rut. With scarcely a pause she begins to write a play about her situation and the other people in her boarding house. But as she pl …
Boston Sunday Globe on Ease
A sleek and silky novel.
Book World, US on Ease
Patrick Gale writes with the understated fluency that is the hallmark of contemporary British fiction, and with the irony that usually accompanies it. Like William Boyd and Martin Amis, he skilfully blends the light and the dark, moving unobtrusively f …
Goodreads.com – Lucy’s Reviews on A Place Called Winter
Set at the turn of the 20th Century, A Place Called Winter tells the moving story of Harry Cane who is forced to abandon his wealthy, easy life in England for the harsh and unforgiving world of the Canadian prairies after an affair. Switching between t …
TheBookbag.co.uk – Luke Marlowe on A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale has a substantial backlist, and several of his books have been bestsellers – Notes From an Exhibition, The Whole Day Through, and A Perfectly Good Man the most recent. A Place Called Winter is his latest, and is his first full length novel …
ALoverOfBooks on A Place Called Winter
Harry Cane is the elder son of a well-off Edwardian family. When Jack his younger brother is born, their mum sadly passes away. Jack and Harry grow up together and are protective of each other. Harry is so painfully shy that he stammers whereas Jack is …
MyThoughtsAboutBooks on A Place Called Winter
A gentle and emotional novel set at the turn of the 20th century about an unacceptable love, friendship and hard work. A Place Called Winter combines the backdrop of the stuffy Edwardian drawing room and the rugged and windblown Canadian Prairies with …
LizLovesBooks on A Place Called Winter
An absolutely remarkable novel, I loved every single minute of it. Old School storytelling at its best, Patrick Gale weaves a heartfelt and emotive web around the reader as we follow a man called Harry Cane through life, love, war, insanity and redempt …
LoveReading.co.uk on A Place Called Winter
Sarah Broadhurst’s view… A slight departure for this highly regarded author being an historical tale of Edwardian London and Canada based on a true story from his family history. Harry Case, a gentleman in suburban London, marries and has a daughter. …
RandomThingsThroughMyLetterBox on A Place Called Winter
Fans of Patrick Gale may be surprised to find that he has written this novel, for A Place Called Winter is historical and set, for the main part of the story, far away from his usual English locations, in the wild, dangerous newly-discovered farmlands …
FromFirstPageToLast on A Place Called Winter
5 of 5 stars I received a copy of this book from the publisher and this is my honest opinion of the book. Harry Crane is born into a life of privilege. The eldest son of a wealthy man, he is left motherless at a young age. With his father often absent, …
GingerBookBlog on A Place Called Winter
Harry Cane marries Winnie after his brother Jack introduces them. It seems more of a convenience relationship than romance but they soon have a daughter together and settle down. It seems that Harry would not have been Winnie’s first choice of husband, …
Alex J Call on A Place Called Winter
“Winter is coming” That’s what George R R Martin promised about a gazillion years ago. For those that are bored of waiting, winter’s here in Patrick Gale’s stunning new novel ‘A Place Called Winter’ Before anyone gets too excited The Game of Thrones se …
The Age, Melbourne on Dangerous Pleasures
Gale tells a devilishly smooth and satisfying short story and is particularly adept at the female revenge fantasy, where women living soul-destroyingly conventional lives finally let loose.
Sunday Express on Dangerous Pleasures
The stories deal with revelation, with what people can become given the right set of circumstances and with the danger that comes with change. Sparky stuff.
Daily Telegraph on Dangerous Pleasures
He excels at capturing emotion and while his sexuality and vivid imagination throw up unusual situations, he deals poignantly with universal themes of love, loss and embarrassment.
The Independent on Dangerous Pleasures
These delightful stories are just as entertaining as Gale’s many well received novels. Particularly fond of miserable women and petulant children, the collection includes a Barbara Pym-ish skit about the denizens of a cathedral close, a cautionary tale …
The Sunday Times on Dangerous Pleasures
Patrick Gale revels in absurd risks. It’s the promise of an unexpected, and potentially implausible, outcome that entices you into his stories; acts of liberation (usually sexual) continually teeter on the brink of humiliation. The prose sizzles with a …
New Woman on Dangerous Pleasures
These tales are fabulous for being what short stories so often aren’t – complete, in that they don’t need ten other chapters to finish them off. Gale’s skill is to lure us in to everyday situations with his casual style and then sock it to us with a fa …
Scotland on Sunday on Dangerous Pleasures
Gale pins down the pain of love and leaving and the no-man’s-land between the apparently real and the illusory. He writes of uncertain memories and threatened loyalties and, in Dressing Up In Voices, of a couple whose passionate, inevitable break-up is …
The Times on Dangerous Pleasures
Patrick Gale has long been a master of short fiction, from the neo-Firbankian novellas to the richer comic realism of The Cat Sanctuary. So it comes as no surprise to find that his first collection of short stories shows him to be an adept of the art. …
The Sunday Times on Dangerous Pleasures
The world in which these stories have their being could scarcely be more substantial. Close attention is paid to the facts of social existence – to the clothes characters wear, the food they eat, the things they value. These are voracious consumers. Th …
Elle on Dangerous Pleasures
Gale is a master of character, and he slips under the skins of his women protagonists with such wit that it’s often hard to believe he’s a man. From the misplaced passions of a jilted writer to the housewife whose life is changed by a blonde wig, these …
Time Out on Dangerous Pleasures
Not one of these eleven stories is a dud. All of them are concerned with the fallout that occurs when soft-focussing fantasy collides with hard-nosed reality. The lingering after-effects lie on the sweeter side of bleak. Witty, moving and very much ali …
Attitude on Dangerous Pleasures
Gale treads David Lynch territory: these stories have a slight edge of surreality, as they peel away the veneer of social and sexual ‘normality’ and uncover something more exotic and dangerous underneath. But unlike Lynch’s work, these stories are esse …
Time Out on Time Out
Gale’s particularly stylised form of English camp may yet make him the EF Benson of his generation, if a rival doesn’t take a contract out on him first.
The Reading Group Review, Chicago on The Aerodynamics of Pork
This deeply ironic tale may remind readers of Joe Orton in the way it swings from cheeky satire to the most despairing humor and social comment. Those who are already familiar with Gale’s writings will not be disappointed; newcomers should give this bo …
Armistead Maupin on The Aerodynamics of Pork
Gale’s concoction is irresistible: modern relationships sketched with period charm. I couldn’t have liked it more.
Publisher’s Weekly, US on The Aerodynamics of Pork
In his first two novels (The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease) Patrick Gale proved himself a novelist with the enviable ability to project himself almost imperceptible distances into the immediate future and create a glorious fantasy. The lowering of the …
Gay Times – Tom Wakefield on The Aerodynamics of Pork
I was particularly pleased with Mo’s marvellously practical approach to her life as a lesbian woman. She appears blissfully free of neuroses and, like this novel, she wears her comedy and tragedy most frivolously and lightly. One feels here that Mr Gal …
City Limits – Boyd Tonkin on The Aerodynamics of Pork
Patrick Gale can’t seem to decide whether he ought to be writing a gay Mills and Boon or the latest attempt at an Evelyn Waugh for the 80s. In Pork, the confusion bears fruit.
The Observer – Maureen Freely on The Aerodynamics of Pork
A clever piece of fluff. It is packed with arch dialogue, affectionate caricatures, and the feigned good humour more commonly found in memoirs written by chauffeurs to the famous.
The Guardian – Hilary Bailey on The Aerodynamics of Pork
A quick thinking book by an author who also has something serious to say.
The Sunday Times – Trevor Lewis on Rough Music
Gale’s limpid prose, unforced and denuded of artifice, is more vivid and revealing than any snapshot, faithfully illuminating the vicissitudes of the heart, memory’s fragility and the wear and tear of habit on desire.
The Independent – Richard Canning on Rough Music
Patrick Gale is among the great, unsung English novelists. He has written a dozen books, each confirming a remarkable insight into his chosen subject, the vagaries of the human heart. His works attract large readerships – mostly women or gay men – draw …
Daily Mail – Elizabeth Buchan on Rough Music
Like the sea he describes so well, Patrick Gale’s clear, unforced prose sucks one in effortlessly. He is an expert on shifting perception and at unearthing buried grief and disappointment. Readable and finely written, this is a very good novel.
The Observer on Rough Music
Gale unravels the details through dialogue as convincing as it is plentiful, while examining containment, fidelity and identity within a child’s universe and the years beyond. And his own identity is relevant, for if he were to adopt a female name, his …
Mail On Sunday on Rough Music
Gale is a master at getting under the skins of his characters and revealing the undercurrents that drive apparently ordinary lives. A subtle, highly evocative tale of memory and desire.
Marie-Claire – Carolyn Hart on Rough Music
Encompassing several fictional genres – family saga, gay love story, adulterous love affair – Patrick Gale’s excellent new novel is, more than anything, a marvellous, page-turning, edge-of-your-seat story – Gale’s ability to evoke the emotional onslaug …
Times Literary Supplement – Emma Tristram on Rough Music
Patrick Gale’s novels grip tightly, like swaddling clothes, stunning the reader into a state of lolling, contented absorption. How does he do it?… Overall the novel suggests that, although happy endings may unravel, our existence is worth having, tha …
The Glasgow Herald – Graham Woolaston on Rough Music
A highly civilised man writing for highly civilised people. But more significantly, his moral universe is also that of his subjects, and as a result this book acknowledges the importance of such grossly old-fashioned values as self-restraint, fidelity …
Baltimore Sun on Rough Music
Gale shows abundant skill in differentiating between Julian’s childish and grown-up voices and in maintaining control over his busy, crowded and ultimately quite poignant narrative.
Washington Post – Mark Luce on Rough Music
Too often it is simple grace that is missing from much contemporary fiction, but Patrick Gale’s Rough Music has enough for several novels… Gale writes beautiful, undulating prose, that explores the uneasy wanderings of the human heart, while rejectin …
Planet Q – John Michael Curlovitch on Rough Music
There is no way of quite conveying what a marvel this novel is… The psychology in this book is both constantly surprising and fully, achingly believable… It is the psychological and emotional depth that raise this book above the family soap opera i …
Attitude – Tim Teeman on Rough Music
Romance of all kinds is what Gale is all about. Romance mixed with the real dirty laundry of our relationships. Romance mixed with tragedy. Romance mixed with supremely evoked landscapes… It ends, qualifiably, on a note of hope (just as it had begun) …
Glasgow Sunday Herald on Rough Music
In all his fiction and nowhere more triumphantly than in this latest novel, Gale gets under the skin of his characters, whatever their sexual orientation. If only straight novelists had the emotional insight across the board of proclivities that Gale d …
Herald Sun, Australia on Rough Music
Gale writes with emotional wisdom about childhood, sex, secrets and love between parents and children. Compelling.
Gold Coast Bulletin on Rough Music
Rough Music weaves a stunning tapestry on which is portrayed the treasons, deceptions, selfishness, tricks of memory, wounds and mercies that comprise family life.
The Age, Australia – Crusader Hills on Rough Music
Gale excels at writing about families and this book is no exception. The best writing in the book is about Frances, who in the present-day narrative is struggling with early onset Alzheimer’s. The tangled, fearful, confused and frighteningly lucid aspe …
Kirkus Review, US on Rough Music
Richly rewarding. Gale leaves behind the comedy on which he’s built a reputation to explore how secrets, betrayals and missed connections come close to tearing a family apart. Gale uses detail to build a palpable sense of regret and emotional urgency. …
Publisher’s Weekly, US on Rough Music
Gale is an English novelist with a particular gift for family dynamics. Cleverly structured and sophisticated in its treatment of time, his latest novel is an alternately sweet, touching and sombre tale of a mildly dysfunctional English family… Myria …
The Anniston Star – Steven Whitton on Rough Music
Rough Music is a touching examination of modern life. It movingly delineates the daily dangers of living and the absolute necessity of “carrying on”.There aren’t many of Patrick Gale’s novels available in this country. This new novel should remedy that …
Armistead Maupin on Rough Music
I envy the lucky souls about to read Patrick Gale for the first time. I’ll never forget the exhilaration I felt upon discovering his wryly elegant narratives, so full of compassion and contradiction. And Rough Music is Gale’s most graceful and grippin …
The Times – Victoria Walker on Rough Music
Though an exploration of sexuality does lie at its core, this novel is not about sex so much as a dysfunctional family struggling to understand itself. Gale places his family amid a national crime and a personal tragedy, slowly raising the veil of misu …
Scene One on Rough Music
Touching and warm with the spectre of tragedy lurking behind every sentence, this is compulsive reading.
The Independent on Rough Music
Sparkling with emotional intelligence and romantic seascapes, Gale’s latest novel is a compelling family drama. A gripping portrait of a marriage, and the quiet, devastating fall-out of family life.
Daily Telegraph – Olivia Glazebrook on Rough Music
Despite traumatic issues of betrayal and violence, he describes his characters with sympathy and charm and fills the book with inconsequential humour, highlighting the family’s resilience. He changes perspective to secure the reader’s understanding and …
The Times – Gill Hornby on Rough Music
Patrick Gale has been developing a reputation over the past few years as a master weaver of multiple narrative strands, and his latest triumph confirms it… The misery of Alzheimer’s is sympathetically and heartbreakingly conveyed. All in all, a compe …
New Statesman – Patricia Duncker on Rough Music
The structure of Rough Music is a masterstroke. Gale sets the two narratives on collision course, thus increasing the urgency of his novel; which is, in fact, a parable about sexual honesty and the love that can be built only on candour and passion. Ga …
Kirkus Review on Caesar’s Wife
All three novellas are humorous and moving, but Gale’s glows with a subtle polish the others lack. “People aren’t what you think they are,”; remarks Brenda’s narrow sister. Nor are books, as Secret Lives proves; at arm’s length, it’s hodgepodge; up clo …
Daily Telegraph on Caesar’s Wife
Short fiction, however good, is notoriously hard to publish. This volume of three novellas is an interesting attempt to surmount the difficulties. The writers are all fine stylists and their stories explore the pains and complications of relationships …
Sunday Times on Caesar’s Wife
Three novellas from very different writers whose shared theme is the complexity and isolation of lives lived in a way that society considers abnormal. All three writers convey well the loneliness of those whom circumstances have condemned to lead secre …
Northern Star – Alan Keill-Griffin on Caesar’s Wife
In Caesar’s Wife, Patrick Gale deals with successful people. Mary, an efficacious editor, becomes the mistress of Tom, an enormously wealthy man. Tom’s wife dies and he wants the obvious. There are lots of intricate twists and turns and a new one on th …
What’s On South East on Caesar’s Wife
Three studies of hidden lives, characters living among the unsuspecting; Patrick Gale’s novella is written from the point of view of a mistress who defies convention by attending her lover’s wife’s funeral then tracks back to tell the complex story of …
The Mail on Sunday – Sean Thomas on Caesar’s Wife
Unusually this unites in one volume three novellas by different authors. All share a touching melancholia.
Gay Community News – Suzy Byrne on Caesar’s Wife
Caesar’s Wife, Patrick Gale’s story of illicit romance between a millionaire married tycoon and a career-led single girl is removed of emotional and passion. Situations change when his wife dies and she years for their secret life to continue untinged …
Gay Times – Peter Burton on Outlines: Armistead Maupin
This is an intimate book, yet Gale manages to strike an even balance between personal details and biographical facts; the two writers’ friendship enhances the story rather than getting in the way; Patrick Gale also writes warmly about Maupin’s long-tim …
Axiom – Mel Pick on Outlines: Armistead Maupin
This is a wonderful biography of the man by Englishman Patrick Gale, who is himself a popular gay author and a close friend of Armistead Maupin. .. . There’s a fascinating account of his meeting and subsequent affair with Rock Hudson; Maupin’s sex life …
Girl! Reporter on A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale’s A Place Called Winter could be a staid, fairly predictable story about a man who leaves Britain to go to Canada on a journey of self-discovery. Instead, from its explosive opening chapter you know that it’s going to be so much more than …
The Sunday Times – Margaret Walters on A Sweet Obscurity
A small girl called Dido — lively, engaging and convincingly intelligent — is at the centre of Patrick Gale’s intriguing and impressive novel. A shadow is cast over the child’s life from the start. Since her mother’s death in a climbing accident, which …
The Independent – Richard Canning on A Sweet Obscurity
Patrick Gale’s novels have become progressively more difficult to précis; none more so than A Sweet Obscurity, his longest and most ambitious since The Facts of Life in 1995. Like its predecessor Rough Music, A Sweet Obscurity is set in Cornwall, where …
The Times – Michael Arditti on A Sweet Obscurity
Giles Easton, the counter-tenor at the heart of A Sweet Obscurity, is rehearsing the role of Oberon in a radical-chic production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck’s line from the Shakespeare source-play, “Lord what fools these mortals be”, m …
