Welcome to the website of Patrick Gale, author of the Emmy award-winning BBC drama, Man in an Orange Shirt and of novels including The Whole Day Through, the Richard and Judy bestsellers Notes From An Exhibition and A Perfectly Good Man, the Costa nominated A Place Called Winter and his fourth Sunday Times bestseller, Take Nothing With You. Please note that Patrick is currently lying low to write. If you’d like him to talk at your bookshop or book festival, by all means lodge an invitation with joe.thomas@headline.co.uk but for 2026!
Patrick and Aidan’s garden at Trevilley, the westernmost rose garden in the country, will be featured this spring on Gardener’s World and you can visit it in May and June to help raise money for the National Garden Scheme’s charities. To watch a short feature on it on BBC Gardeners World click hereclick here and go to 20.50 minutes into the episode.To find out more, click here.
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR >LATEST BOOK
Mother’s Boy
Patrick’s seventeenth novel is his first fully historical one since A Place Called Winter. It is based around the known facts of the boyhood and youth of the great Cornish poet, Charles Causley and the life of the mother who raised him singlehandedly. Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura’s husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius. As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work. Mother’s Boy is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.
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