Patrick Gale

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 gripping work yet: a sort of omnisexual family mystery that reveals itself over the course of two far-apart seaside summers. I was torn between
a reader’s urge to devour it on the spot and a writer’s instinct to dissect and analyse every splendid sentence.