Patrick Gale

This event has now been rescheduled for the 9th of May. If you had made a previous booking for the last date, we will be contacting you separately via email and your booking will be valid for this new date.

One of the country’s best-loved novelists, the author of Notes From An Exhibition and A Place Called Winter, Patrick Gale joins us in St Andrews for his new novel Mother’s Boy.

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.