Rough Music (Paperback)

'What is delightful about Gale's fiction is that it so warmly and convincingly illuminates ordinary lives and interests. His staples are difficult loves, botched careers, tangled family histories -- mainstream stuff, with the offbeat as an extra' Daily Telegraph 'Exerts the unmistakable 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' Mail on Sunday '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' Elle 'Terrific' Time Out

William is about to go on holiday with his elderly parents to the Cornish seaside bungalow they first visited during his childhood in the 1960s. At that earlier time his mother's secret holiday romance sparked a tragedy which set the family on a new course. Today William is also having a secret affair. His mother's dissolving inhibitions due to Alzheimer's disease cause her to reveal this relationship to the one person it will hurt the most. The seismic shock of this revelation shatters the family again. Gale writes vividly about how it feels to be a child in an adult's world, and how families cope with shocks and tragedy. (Kirkus UK)

In his richly rewarding ninth novel, British author Gale ("Tree Surgery for Beginners", 1994, etc.) 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. From the powerful opening image of a woman feeling the ocean suck the sand from beneath her feet, Gale intertwines two plots concerning the same family and taking place in the same beach cottage 30-odd years apart. In the 1960s, eight-year-old Julian Pagett and his gently inhibited parents go to Cornwall for a vacation that begins with great promise but spirals out of control with the arrival from America of the boy's uncle and cousin. In the contemporary story, Julian has evolved into Will, a 40-year-old bookstore owner having an affair with his sister's husband. For his birthday, Will's unsuspecting sister gives him a vacation in Cornwall. Will brings along his parents, stoic John and gutsy Frances, who is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's. Frances is a remarkable creation full of emotional nooks and crannies, whether as a young, rather proper British matron discovering her sexuality, or as a grandmother who sees the world she inhabits with cruel clarity despite her failing memory. John too is drawn with nuanced delicacy, particularly his inability to express the intense love he feels for Frances with the abandon they both crave. Will's story is less compelling, his romance with a mysterious stranger predictable and too neatly settled. But, overall, Gale uses detail-a lunch of fish and chips on a pier, a moment of intimacy seen by mistake through a half-open door-to build a palpable sense of regret and emotional urgency. His treatment of issues like Alzheimer's and gay love rises above the trendy and politically correct; his characters are so imperfect they are impossible not to love. If Oprah takes British writers, this is a shoo-in. (Kirkus Reviews)

A subtle and entertaining tragicomic love story. Rough Music is a family story, starting with an idyllic -- though definitely strange -- childhood, ending in almost a tragedy. At its heart (and the heart is darkness) there is a mystery, to be understood only when the child Julian becomes a man. Julian as a small boy is taken on the perfect Cornish holiday. When glamorous American cousins unexpectedly swell the party, however, emotions run high and events spiral out of control. Though he has been brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, 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. Set mostly on Cornish beaches, against glittering seas, 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.