The Facts of Life

Spanning three generations, the first half of this novel focuses on Edward and Sally, who can't find happiness until Edward can forget his dark past in Germany's prison camps. The second half continues with the lives of Edward's grandchildren, Alison and Jamie, searching for independence and love.

The facts of life

GALE, Patrick

Flamingo

Tree Surgery for Beginners

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Facing the Tank

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.

Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.

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.

Kansas in August

Literary

Unknown

A composer who finds success in his later years surveys his grandchildren as they come to terms with the harsher facts of modern life. A young composer, Edward Pepper, is exiled from his native Germany by the war, struck down with TB, and left to languish in an isolation hospital. But then he falls in love with his doctor, Sally Banks, and his world is transformed. They set up home in a bizarre dodecahedral folly, The Roundel -- a potent place, which grows in significance as it bears witness to their family's tragedies and joys. The years pass, and Edward watches from this sanctuary as both his grandchildren, Jamie and Alison, fall prey to the charms of Sam, an enigmatic builder, and have to come to terms with some of the tougher facts of life.

Harper-perennial

A collection of Patrick Gale's most brilliant pieces of short fiction. The subjects are wide-ranging and various -- curious childhood loyalties, long-hidden memories, newly discovered joys, startling secrets, dislocated relationships, overwhelming, thrilling passions. In prose which is vivid and fresh, Patrick Gale explores the subtle boundaries that shift between the fantastic and shockingly real. With characteristic insight and wit and with consummate ease, he draws the reader into lives both familiar and strange, revealing a world that shines with possibilities and will never fail to delight.

Dangerous Pleasures: A Decade of Stories

HarperCollins, Publishers

From the author of The Facts of Life comes a cunning mix of tragedy and comedy, featuring one man's journey to self-discovery. * As befits the hero of a modern fairy tale, 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 a hero, he grows up happier with plants than people. Whilst 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...* With a bold mixture of tragicomedy, harsh truth and sublime fantasy, Patrick Gale has created 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.

A J L OUT OF BUSINESS / DELTA

A subtle and entertaining tragicomic love story. 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.

Rough Music

Ballantine Publishing Group

Youthful beauty, intellectual brilliance, physical passion, tragedy and disgrace are all in this wonderful new Patrick Gale novel as told through the eyes of a 14 year old girl. Sophie is a self-contained,exceptionally bright child who has no known parents and has spent all her life in a children's home.Her life is transformed when she wins a scholarship to Tatham's,a kind of Oxbridge university for teenagers,but this is only the start of an education as much emotional as intellectual. She falls hopelessly in love with Lucas, adored gay son of a wealthy Jewish family and, through him, is drawn into a tangle of betrayed friendship and forbidden passions that ends in tragedy and disgrace. But school is only half the story. Spanning the years 1975 to 1979 the chapters alternate between terms and holidays, between Sophie's dogged pursuit of the glittering prizes and her slow, painful discovery of who she is and where she belongs. Through other people's families, and especially other people's mothers, she learns as much about the mysterious laws of class and love as she learns from her teachers about the Latin and Greek that will prove her passport to security.

Friendly Fire

4th Estate

Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.

Notes From An Exhibition

HarperCollins Publishers, Limited

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Books by GALE, Patrick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GALE, Patrick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The facts of life

Tree Surgery for Beginners

Facing the Tank

Kansas in August

The Facts of Life

Dangerous Pleasures: A Decade of Stories

Tree Surgery for Beginners

Rough Music

Friendly Fire

Notes From An Exhibition