Cassie McCullagh

Congratulations to them.

Well, we have new novels from Patrick Gale, Rick Joukowsky and Amitava Kumar with reviewers Bernard Cohen and Liz Berski.

What, did her superannuation run out or something?

No, no, I'm sure it's really good.

Wow, OK, that's very interesting.

I assume from this book that we've read, Take Nothing With You, that Patrick Gale himself is gay as well.

So Patrick Gale, Emmy winner and now the author of 16 books because this latest one is his 16th.

Now this tells the story of one man's life.

It's in two time periods.

So it's the present when he's an older man looking back at his life.

A coming of age story wrapped in the retrospectivity of his older life.

Yeah, it's in a strange old house filled with strange old people and strange old smells.

It's really quite an odd setting.

Well, I imagine that would be a very powerful influence.

Your father's a prison governor.

Now, Kate, I think people say that everyone has a story in them.

And this seems to be, for me, an exercise in if you zero in enough on a life, any life, that there's going to be a story and it's going to be interesting.

Except maybe this could be the exception.

novel.

There are some really beautifully drawn parts of this and the young man in there I felt a lot for.