A novel about downsizing from a life of ease and upgrading to one of sleaze. Many people would kill to be Domina Tey. She's one of life's successes: an award-winning playwright living in a beautiful house with an equally celebrated writer. But she isn't happy. Life is too easy. It's becoming stultifying, negating her creative force. She decides upon a spell of sleazy living to give both her work and her soul a spring-clean – and elopes with her typewriter in search of just a hint of degradation. She finds it in Bayswater. Safe in bedsit land, she immediately sets about getting to know her neighbours. However, her careless plotting of their lives leads to consequences both tragic and deliciously entertaining.

A toe-tapping story of life and its wonderful and unexpected complexities. Hilary is a young, attractive teacher with aspirations to be a tap-dancer. Henry, his elder sister, is a crisp, professional psychologist. The unpredictable and unreliable Rufus, a failed pianist, is their lover – whom neither Hilary nor Henry realise they are sharing. Despite the constant danger of discovery, this unwitting triangle persists, in delicate balance – until, that is, someone new and totally unexpected enters the frame. Having rescued an abandoned baby boy, found soaked and tearful in a subway, Hilary decides, to his own great surprise, to become a surrogate parent.

From the author of A Perfectly Good Man, the bestselling story of an artist tormented by depression and the toll of creativity. When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies she leaves behind an extraordinary body of work – but for her family there is a legacy of secrets and painful revelations. Rachel exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, as they cope with the inheritance of her passions – and demons. Only their father's gift of stillness can withstand Rachel's destructive influence and the suspicion that they all came a poor second to her art. Piecing together the clues of her life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – takes the reader from Cornwall to Canada across a span of forty years. What emerges is a tender story of enduring love, and a portrait of a family coping with the sometimes too dazzling brilliance of a genius.

Patrick Gale's first novel is suffused with heady wish-fulfilment as two contrasting love stories entwine in the space of one simmering summer week. WPC Mo Faithe is overcome with lust while investigating a series of violent attacks on newspaper astrologers. Meanwhile in Cornwall, the Peakes are conducting their annual music festival, the cue for their two 'children' – Seth, a young violin prodigy, and Venetia, a highly-strung scholar – to embark upon a voyage of self-discovery. As Seth sets out in hot pursuit of unconventional romance on the cliff-tops, the virginal Venetia displays every symptom of an immaculate conception.

A vivid and compelling portrait of a man at odds with himself; and an extended family of friends and lovers trying to take its proper shape. Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother's life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. While he is straightforward, honest, and a doting dad, he can be a difficult, taciturn husband – but he's the last person one would suspect of being a killer. Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife-beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind.

Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, Rough Music is a novel of one family at two defining points in time. Seamlessly alternating between the present day and a summer thirty years past, its twin stories unfold at a cottage along the eastern coast of England.Will Pagett receives an unexpected gift on his fortieth birthday, two weeks at a perfect beach house in Cornwall. Seeking some distance from the married man with whom he's having an affair, he invites his aging mother and father to share his holiday, knowing the sun and sea will be a welcome change for. But the cottage and the stretch of sand before it seem somehow familiar and memories of a summer long ago begin to surface. Thirty-two years earlier. A young married couple and their eight year-old son begin two idyllic weeks at a beach house in Cornwall. But the sudden arrival of unknown American relatives has devastating consequences, turning what was to be a moment of reconciliation into an act of betrayal that will cast a lengthy shadow.As Patrick Gale masterfully unspools these parallel stories, we see their subtle and surprising reflections in each other and discover how the forgotten dramas of childhood are reenacted throughout our lives.Deftly navigating the terrain between humor and tragedy, Patrick Gale has written an unforgettable novel about the lies that adults tell and the small acts of treason that children can commit. Rough Music gracefully illuminates the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.

A writer visits a quaint English Cathedral town and discovers its goings-on are stranger than fiction. When Evan J. Kirby, an eminent American expert on heaven and hell, arrives in Barrowcester to do some research, he finds the community in a less than blissful state. There is the bishop sharing his doubts with the confirmation class while his mother feeds marijuana cookies to Evan's landlady to unleash her psychic powers. Then there is Emma lurking in her father's study waiting for love; Dawn sitting naked in a deckchair at midnight waiting for the Devil, and Madeleine seeking refuge from a cardinally inclined Cardinal. When Evan delves into the true origins of the local saint, a macabre and romantic sequence of events begins to unfold.

A moving and intensely felt examination of the lengths to which we will go to seek protection and security in others. Returning to haunted Cornish landscapes familiar from other Gale novels, it is the story of individuals in search of a family. Dido, the nine-year-old heroine and emotional centre of Patrick Gale's latest painful comedy, knows that the adults who surround her, the adults who should know better, depend on her for happiness. So who is she to turn to when her short life turns upside down and tragic family history threatens to repeat itself. Eliza, the clever, depressive aunt who has brought Dido up, and whose brilliant academic career has foundered due to the demands of unlooked-for motherhood, tries and fails to give Dido the happy normal childhood she never had herself. Her ex-husband Giles needs Dido back in his life, feeling it has lost all meaning, all substance, without her. Then there is Pearce, the new love interest in Eliza'a life, desperate to give Eliza and...

An exhilarating collection of stories by the author of Richard & Judy-bestseller Notes from an Exhibition Patrick Gale, which combines wit and poignancy to illuminate experiences both common and uncommon. Love (& loathing) within families are dissected – a father makes an unexpected discovery about his son which is too hard for him to cope with. A son wreaks revenge through the power of cookery. Three generations of the same family gain freedom through the years in a once-despised caravan. A bored wife finds happiness when an old lag teaches her the art of angling. A dog-training lesson with a puppy who hasn't grasped the meaning of 'obedience' leads to the discovery of a murder. Here too are music and silence – the sweetness and sadness of Festivals, of the Church, and of the control exercised by those in charge in small communities. This tremendously enjoyable collection of stories has the same wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as Gale's bestselling novels,...