Patrick gale biography and opposing
Summary
Bittersweet and startling, A SWEET OBSCURITY is a multi-stranded novel of childhood, coming of age and the heartbreaking consequences of family life in disarray...
'Intriguing and impressive. A memorable study of a child forced cruelly, even tragically, to grow up too soon' Sunday Times
Since her mother's death, nine-year-old Dido has been living with her eccentric aunt, acting as peacekeeper between Eliza, her estranged husband Giles and his girlfriend. They are each cruelly burdened in different ways. Chance draws them down to Cornwall, where a country idyll offers to lighten their urban cares.
Then Eliza falls in love with local farmer, Pearce, an event that causes the four adults to re-assess their lives, with some painful and unforeseen consequences for adults and child alike...
'Gale's talent is undeniable' Guardian
What readers loved about A SWEET OBSCURITY:
'Patrick Gale writes fiction which totally absorbs the reader by creating characters that you feel you know. The richness of his writing and the depth of his storylines make each book compulsive reading' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'Something, anything, by Patrick Gale would definitely be on my Desert Island Books list, but A Sweet Obscurity is the one I go back to most often' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Patrick Gale was born in 1962 on the Isle of Wight. He is a British novelist He was educated at The Pilgrims' School, the choir school for both Winchester Cathedral and Winchester College, then at Winchester College itself and at New College, University of Oxford. Following university he had a range of jobs while he sang for the London Philharmonic Choir and wrote his first novel, The Aerodynamics of Pork while working as a waiter in an all-night restaurant. His works include: Ease, Kansas in August, Little Bits of Baby and A Place Called Winter.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Notes from an Exhibition
There are poignant moments when her youngest son carries home from the beach stones representing each of the family members and doesn't want to leave any behind even the heavier ones because "it's us." There are sad moments when a traditional birthday celebration with Rachel and each of her children turn out not as happy as we would have hoped . There are learning moments as I knew very little about Quakerism. Their individual stories unfold slowly through their chapters as well as those of their siblings and parents ,and reveal how they have been affected by their mother , their wife and how they were inevitably affected by her mental illness, by her art and creatively. It is just as much their story as it is Rachel's.
There are things we don't know for a while. We know little about Rachel's past and neither does her family until more than halfway through. We don't know until close to the end what happened to Petroc and for most of the book we know little about her daughter Morwenna, who has inherited her mother's talent as well as her illness. This was a compelling read for me because from the beginning I wanted to know these things and to understand these characters. It's not an easy subject matter to portray, but Gale has elegantly done so. This is the first book I have read by Gale and I will almost certainly read more.
Thanks to Open Road Medi
Over the last year, I’ve travelled in time and space from Calcutta in the late 1960s to Canada in the 1900s. I’ve witnessed the sinking of a Thames houseboat (the cat escaped, but only just), the lifting of beet on a struggling Yorkshire hill farm and the smoking of Sobranies at a Hungarian party in a tiny London flat (‘Dar-link! Von-dare-fool!’) I’ve witnessed the invasion of a strip club, a miscarriage at a baby shower, people being abused and betrayed and drawn into relationships with those who have misused them; painters at work, alcoholics in recovery, and, from the perspective of the afterlife, a woman trying to get over her still-living husband.
I’ve encountered villains, lovers, rescuers, torturers, aliens and a whole host of heroines. I had the chance to get to know Penelope Fitzgerald and George Eliot, and I observed a Brush with Greatness: (fictional) artist Rachel Kelly bumping into Dame Barbara Hepworth on a booze run.
It has been a terrific year’s reading, mainly of novels, almost all by writers who were new to me. Some were published this year, others some time ago; one – Patrick Gale’s A Place Called Winter − is due out in 2015. Some were recommendations; others I looked up because I’d come across the writers on Twitter or heard about them online. Twitter has played a part in my reading this year as never before – it’s a great medium for fandom.
The other novelty for me was that it was the first year I started reading on Kindle – though I’ve read most of these titles in paperback, which I still prefer. I was talking to a reader at a book group recently who said she read everything on her Kindle and had no idea what the books were called – if people asked her what she’d been reading, she had to look it up. She had started making a point of checking what the covers looked like. I’m still getting my head round this brave new ebook world… I don’t feel like I really own a book unless I have it on paper, and I don’t feel like I engage wit .