Bestselling British author Patrick Gale casts an empathetic and ferocious eye on the domestic wounds inflicted by families and lovers in this dark comedy.   One minute Deborah Curtis's husband, Julian, is alive, a handsome figure leaving their rented house in an African principality, kissing his wife goodbye in the early morning sunshine. The next moment he's dead, the ground shaking in the aftermath of a deafening explosion. Months later, Deborah...

A riotous dark comedy set in the backstreets of London about an unconventional love triangle, a lonely teacher, and a lost baby. Hilary Metcalfe is an English teacher who loathes his work so thoroughly that he requires a half bottle of scotch in order to grade a stack of homework. His only joys are private ones: American musicals, from South Pacific to The King and I, and his absolutely gorgeous lover, Rufus, whom he has utterly failed to domesticate....

A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonized Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place...

Patrick Gale's perennially popular debut novel takes a wry and romantic look at love both in and out of the closet.   At fifteen years and eleven months, violinist Seth Peake is a musical prodigy who's secretly attracted to men. Scheduled to begin music college in the fall, he is en route to Cornwall to spend the summer at the Trenellion Festival, a pacifist festival of art and music his family helped to found. There he falls head over heels for...

At an elite English boarding school in the late 1970s, an orphaned fourteen-year-old girl falls in love with two boys-one of them gay-in this coming-of-age novel The town orphanage has been Sophie Cullen's only home since she was five years old. She knows not whether her parents are living or dead, and has no memory of her life before Wakefield House. No one is more surprised than Sophie when she wins the last scholarship to an exclusive boarding...

This sweeping saga from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition follows three generations of an English family from World War II through the AIDS crisis. Sally Banks meets Edward Pepper when the German-Jewish soldier is lying wounded in an English hospital during World War II. After he recovers, Edward invites Sally to accompany him to a concert. Despite the fact that he's several years her junior, they begin dating and, little by little,...

Bestselling author Patrick Gale's quirky and hilarious novel of English country life is "a ridiculously crazy tour de force" ( Publishers Weekly ). The town of Barrowcester-pronounced "Brewster"-is English as can be. From its cozy little pubs to its immaculate cathedral close, the quiet city seems straight out of the pages of Thomas Hardy. For American academic Evan Kirby, it's paradise, a welcome escape from the United States, where he was haunted...

Love-common and uncommon, vengeful and transformational-is the theme of this superb collection from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition . From subtle tales of domestic unease to a story featuring a caravan that transports three generations of a family away from their small-town lives, author Patrick Gale proves in his second story collection that he is a master at mining the loneliness, yearning, and eternal optimism of the human spirit....

An intimate biography of the gay icon whose Tales of the City novels changed America's understanding of LGBT culture during the 1970s and AIDS-afflicted 1980s. Step into Armistead Maupin's house, and you will be greeted by a strapping young gardener, a wave of marijuana smoke, and the most gracious host in the world. When he isn't flitting from protests to orgies, Maupin is a natural storyteller, and San Francisco is his favorite subject. Pull up...

This bestselling bittersweet story of love and second chances takes place over the course of a single summer day . . . or does it? The only child of eccentric academics who never married, Laura Lewis was an undergrad at Oxford when she met Ben Patterson. They shared an idyllic few months of passion, only to go their separate ways when Ben ended their relationship. Two decades later, Laura is a self-employed accountant with a history of unfulfilling...