The Aerodynamics of Pork


Book Description

Patrick Gale’s perennially popular debut novel takes a wry and romantic look at love both in and out of the closet. At fifteen years and eleven months, violinist Seth Peake is a musical prodigy who’s secretly attracted to men. Scheduled to begin music college in the fall, he is en route to Cornwall to spend the summer at the Trenellion Festival, a pacifist festival of art and music his family helped to found. There he falls head over heels for a gorgeous, unsuitable sculptor named Roland. Seth’s older sister, Venetia, has a problem. Her period is five weeks late. But she’s a virgin and no one has touched her sexually except her father, Huw—a secret she has told no one. Is the world about to bear witness to history’s second immaculate conception? Doing her best to hold the family together is mother and wife Evelyn, who prays for Venetia to find fulfillment, Seth to be spared from pride, and her problems with Huw magically to vanish. Inspector Maude Faithe—Mo to her friends—is a lesbian cop who fought for the right of policewomen to wear pants, given that they’re doing a “man’s job.” She has risen through the ranks of London’s Metropolitan Police and been promoted twice for bravery. She lives alone with her large cat and a secret tragedy—until she falls passionately in lust with a singer. As Mo and Hope become lovers, Mo’s dogged pursuit of the person responsible for stealing and desecrating the predictions of a newspaper astrologer leads to a surprising culprit. A witty and wise novel about sexual equality and the thrills and perils of wish fulfillment, The Aerodynamics of Pork is an exhilarating ode to love that remains a cult favorite with Patrick Gale fans and readers of gay and lesbian fiction.




The Aerodynamics of Pork


Book Description

"WPC Mo Faithe is overcome with lust while investigating a series of violent attacks on newspaper astrologers. Meanwhile in Cornwall, the Peakes are conducting their annual music festival, the cue for their two children--Seth, a young violin prodigy, and Venetia, a highly-strung scholar--to embark upon a voyage of self-discovery. As Seth sets out in hot pursuit of unconventional romance on the cliff-tops, the virginal Venetia displays every symptom of an immaculate conception"--Page 4 of cover.




A Place Called Winter


Book Description

"Patrick Gale has written a book which manages to be both tender and epic, and carries the unmistakable tang of a true story. I loved it." -- Jojo Moyes A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the golden suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before. In this exquisite journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. This is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.




Ease


Book Description

A novel about downsizing from a life of ease and upgrading to one of sleaze. Many people would kill to be Domina Tey. She's one of life's successes: an award-winning playwright living in a beautiful house with an equally celebrated writer. But she isn't happy. Life is too easy. It's becoming stultifying, negating her creative force. She decides upon a spell of sleazy living to give both her work and her soul a spring-clean - and elopes with her typewriter in search of just a hint of degradation. She finds it in Bayswater. Safe in bedsit land, she immediately sets about getting to know her neighbours. However, her careless plotting of their lives leads to consequences both tragic and deliciously entertaining.




The Cat Sanctuary


Book Description

A powerful and moving novel in which Patrick Gale casts a compassionate yet satirically sharp eye over the pains and abuses inflicted by families, friends and lovers. Judith and Deborah are sisters driven apart by traumatic events in their childhood, but thrown back together again when Deborah's diplomat husband is accidentally assassinated. Judith's lover, Joanna, the instigator of this awkward reunion, finds that as the sisters' murky past is raked up, so too is her own, and the three women become embroiled in a tangle of passion and recrimination.




Song of the Loon


Book Description

“More completely than any author before him, Richard Amory explores the tormented world of love for man by man . . . a happy amalgam of James Fenimore Cooper, Jean Genet and Hudson’s Green Mansions.”—from the cover copy of the 1969 edition Published well ahead of its time, in 1966 by Greenleaf Classics, Song of the Loon is a romantic novel that tells the story of Ephraim MacIver and his travels through the wilderness. Along his journey, he meets a number of characters who share with him stories, wisdom and homosexual encounters. The most popular erotic gay book of the 1960s and 1970s, Song of the Loon was the inspiration for two sequels, a 1970 film of the same name, at least one porn movie and a parody novel called Fruit of the Loon. Unique among pulp novels of the time, the gay characters in Song of the Loon are strong and romantically drawn, which has earned the book a place in the canon of gay American literature. With an introduction by Michael Bronski, editor of Pulp Friction and author of The Pleasure Principle. Little Sister’s Classics is a new series of books from Arsenal Pulp Press, reviving lost and out-of-print gay and lesbian classic books, both fiction and nonfiction. The books in the series are produced in conjunction with Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium, the heroic Vancouver bookstore well-known for its anti-censorship efforts.




Take Nothing With You


Book Description

'Absolutely one of his best - a wonderful, wonderful read' Stephen Fry 'Funny and heartfelt' Spectator From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes a compassionate, compelling new novel of boyhood, coming of age, and the confusions of desire and reality. 'An incredibly beautiful story told with compassion. Nothing is wasted. Each sentence is beautifully crafted' Joanna Cannon 1970s Weston-Super-Mare and ten-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice. Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives. 'It's delicious, it's dear, it's heart-breaking and very funny' Rachel Joyce 'Suffused with the joy and wisdom of Gale's mid-life reconnection with music' Guardian 'Gale is excellent on the hot, messy nature of self-discovery and sexual awakening' Daily Mail 'Generously optimistic. It shows how our past shapes us, but suggests that we can make something from the emotional burdens that we bear' Telegraph What readers love about TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU: 'This is a beautifully written novel, simple to read but so humane and warm' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'As with all his books you feel you are reading about someone you know intimately such is his amazing characterisation. Read this book and feel totally fulfilled' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'This is a warming tale of a younger and later an old man overcoming adversity through his innate goodness, humour and optimism' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Gale is a wonderful writer. His description of the Schubert string quintet rehearsals perfectly described the slow movement. I'd been searching for that music for a few years. This story is brilliant on so many fronts' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'A very beautiful novel of love, friendship and the cello' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐




My Search for Warren Harding


Book Description

An exhilarating, brutal, comedic masterpiece—an American classic that will “leave you so giddy you’ll go and kick sand in somebody’s face” (Houston Post) When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket’s glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, “The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system”; Florence King at the Dallas Times Herald, “The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book.” More recently, though long out of print, it was canonized in The Guardian’s “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of “great American comic fiction,” and praised by Michael Leone in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes.” Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian—Harvard BA, Columbia PhD—with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, “the shallowest President in history.” After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the 29th president’s bawdy billets-doux that is rumored to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.




Notes from an Exhibition


Book Description

'Poised and pitch-perfect throughout' Mail on Sunday Set in Cornwall, the bestselling novel of artistic compulsion, marriage, and the secrets left behind. 'This book is complete perfection' Stephen Fry Celebrated artist Rachel Kelly dies alone in her Penzance studio, after decades of struggling with the creative highs and devastating lows that have coloured her life. Her family gathers, each of them searching for answers. They reflect on lives shaped by the enigmatic Rachel - as artist, wife and mother - and on the ambiguous legacies she leaves them, of talent, torment and transcendent love. 'An uplifting, immensely empathetic novel' Guardian What readers love about NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION: ' A shifting, multi-layered, beautifully textured portrait of not-quite ordinary family life' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'The word that shimmers with me is empathy. Gale has such a sensitive understanding of how minds and hearts work and react on one another amid the chaos and sometimes intense joys of real living' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'I loved the exhibition-style notes at the beginning of each chapter, which heralded a hint of the chapter's contents. Beautifully woven back and forth in time to reveal the complexities of fascinating family members and their relationships' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐




The Whole Day Through


Book Description

This bestselling bittersweet story of love and second chances takes place over the course of a single summer day . . . or does it? The only child of eccentric academics who never married, Laura Lewis was an undergrad at Oxford when she met Ben Patterson. They shared an idyllic few months of passion, only to go their separate ways when Ben ended their relationship. Two decades later, Laura is a self-employed accountant with a history of unfulfilling liaisons with married men, her adult life “mapped out in relationships not achievements.” She leaves Paris to return to England, determined to keep her osteoporosis-stricken mother from the indignities of an institution by caring for her at home. At a hospital in historic Winchester, Laura runs into her former love. A onetime HIV consultant, Ben has also come home to be a caregiver to his gay younger brother with mosaic Down syndrome. Ben is now married to Chloe, a former model he doesn’t love. In spite of the obstacles against them, Laura and Ben rekindle their affair. The Whole Day Through takes place over twenty-four hours, while simultaneously spanning decades to tell Laura and Ben’s story. As the narrative threads move inexorably toward each other, past and present merge in a haunting collage of memory, mortality, missed chances, and the obligations and regrets of love. This novel from the bestselling British author of Notes from an Exhibition was a Sainsbury’s Book Club pick in the UK.