Patrick Gale

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 insight into each character, assuming the voice of an eight-year-old boy, a forty-year old man or a middle-aged woman with precision and honesty… Rough Music is a painfully acute but never reproachful examination of a past that will not vanish.