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Award winning author, Patrick Gale announced recently that next March 2022, his eagerly awaited novel, ‘Mother’s Boy’ will be published. Having lived in Cornwall since the 1980’s, the beauty of this geographical setting is often the background for Patrick’s critically acclaimed stories.
Patrick lives on a farm near Land’s End with his husband, Aidan Hicks where they raise beef cattle and grow barley. Patrick also chairs the North Cornwall Book Festival, is a patron of Penzance LitFest and a director of both Endelienta and the Charles Causley Trust.
Synopsis of Mother’s Boy; taken from
https://uk.bookshop.org/books/mother-s-boy-9781472257413/9781472257413
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 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 privately 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.
Reviews
‘A writer with heart, soul, and a dark and naughty wit, one whose company you relish and trust’ – Observer
