Patrick Gale Books in Order

In this mischievous debut, a Cornish music festival and a London police case collide. Sixteen-year-old violinist Seth is falling in love for the first time, while detective Mo is chasing trouble much closer to his family than anyone expects.

Successful playwright Domina Tey walks out on her ordered Bristol life and hides in a Bayswater bedsit under a false name. Her meddling in the lives of the other residents turns comic curiosity into something far messier and sadder.

Hilary, a young teacher with a secret tap dancing habit and a head full of musicals, finds an abandoned baby in a subway and takes it home. His impulsive rescue scrambles his search for love, family and a workable adult life.

American scholar Evan Kirby arrives in the cathedral city of Barrowcester to study angels and demons, and finds plenty of earthly chaos instead. Beneath the town's polished surface, desire, scandal and hints of the supernatural are already at work.

Candida, a fading breakfast television presenter, decides to christen her baby and asks her childhood friend Robin to be godfather. But Robin arrives from a remote monastery carrying old resentments, and the family celebration begins to tilt toward crisis.

On Bodmin Moor, photographer Joanna brings her bereaved sister-in-law Deborah home to recover after a political bombing. What follows is an intimate, tense struggle between three women, as old wounds, grief and buried memories turn domestic life dangerous.

This anthology gathers three novellas about hidden desires and private bargains. Patrick Gale's contribution, Caesar's Wife, follows a long-kept mistress whose comfortable arrangement is thrown into doubt when marriage suddenly becomes possible.

Edward Pepper escapes Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport, survives illness and remakes his life in England with the doctor who becomes his wife. This sweeping family novel follows love, art, survivor's guilt and loss across several generations.

Tree surgeon Lawrence Frost loves his wife and child but can barely say what he feels. When his wife vanishes and he becomes a murder suspect, a strange sea voyage with his uncle forces him toward passion, shame and a harsher self-knowledge.

Patrick Gale completed Tom Wakefield's unfinished novel about Edward, a Midlands mining boy dazzled by movie glamour and hungry for escape. As he grows up and reaches beyond school and village life, his longing for stardom leaves bruises behind.

This short life of Armistead Maupin grows out of Gale's friendship with the author of Tales of the City. It offers a personal, lively portrait of Maupin's life, work and activism, with close attention to the family tensions behind the public story.

A birthday trip to Cornwall brings a gay bookseller, his difficult family and his married lover into one cramped holiday cottage. In parallel, an earlier family holiday plays out nearby, and the buried damage linking the two timelines slowly comes clear.

Four troubled adults circle around Dido, a bright child who has stumbled onto a terrible secret. As music, longing and old disappointments pull the story from London to Cornwall, everyone is looking for safety and making matters worse.

At an elite church school, sharp-eyed outsider Sophie watches friendship, desire and status turn volatile among the boys around her. This is a tense coming of age story about adolescence, belonging and the dangerous blur between authority and intimacy.

When artist Rachel Kelly dies in her attic studio, her husband and grown children are left to sort through more than paintings. This moving family novel tracks the damage and mystery left by bipolar illness, love and years of carefully kept secrets.

This later story collection shows Gale at his darker and stranger, with ghost stories, sly comedy and domestic unease sitting side by side. Ordinary English lives, church trips and Cornish landscapes keep tipping into menace, revenge or the supernatural.

Laura Lewis leaves her life in Paris to care for her aging mother in Winchester, then runs into the great love of her student days. Their reunion opens a tender second-chance story about duty, caregiving and the habits that keep people from happiness.

When a young man commits suicide in front of Barnaby Johnson, a beloved Cornish priest, the shock ripples through everyone around him. The novel asks what goodness really looks like when faith, family loyalty and private grief all collide.

Harry Cane, shy, privileged and trapped by Edwardian expectations, loses everything when an illicit affair is exposed. Sent to the Canadian prairies, he must survive a harsh new world and work out whether exile might also offer a chance at real love.

This first story collection celebrates Gale's opening decade as a published writer. The pieces move from sharp social comedy to the eerie and unsettling, showing how quickly ordinary lives can slide toward obsession, menace or emotional shock.

While undergoing cancer treatment, middle-aged Eustace is left alone with cello music and his own memories. The novel moves between his present and his strange 1970s childhood, showing how music, love and betrayal shaped the man he became.

This big volume brings together Dangerous Pleasures, Gentleman's Relish and the elusive novella Caesar's Wife. Expect dark humor, ghostly turns, family tensions and a wide-ranging set of stories that move between the ordinary and the deeply odd.

Based on the early life of Charles Causley, this novel follows the poet and his fiercely devoted mother, Laura, from poor Cornish beginnings into wartime adulthood. It is a quiet, searching story about talent, secrecy, class and maternal devotion.

In 1952, elderly farmer Harry Cane returns from Saskatchewan to the English family he left behind decades earlier. His arrival stirs old hurts, buried secrets and unexpected recognition in a tender, closely observed novel about home, age and second chances.