Love Lane

With Love Lane, Gale gets right to the secret joys and hidden heartbreaks of ordinary, flawed family life. A tender, delicately devastating novel * Sarah Waters *Miraculous, mischievous and quietly devastating, Love Lane is the irresistible story of five individuals, linked by the past and yet separated by the present. I have just fallen in love with a beautiful book * Rachel Joyce *Five threads of storytelling interweave to form the braid of a novel both poignant and elegiac. A story of missed opportunities and, ultimately, a memorable story of forgiveness * Sarah Winman *Patrick Gale brings his usual compassionate sympathy, impeccable research and elegant style to his powerful new novel. Love Lane is an involving story of reconciliation, secrets and compromises, rich in emotional truth and evocative historical detail * Clare Chambers *I adored this book. Patrick Gale’s writing glows with compassion, as does his subtle, unflinching insight into his characters. Love Lane is an engulfing, deeply humane novel about the triumphs and failures of human connection * Marina Kemp *An intimate and closely-observed novel - a family drama full of heart-rending moments illumined by the power of suppressed desire. The characters feel real, knowable and alive. Full of rich detail, this story brings private pasts to light with all of Gale’s signature warmth, grace and humanity * Seán Hewitt *I adored this book. Patrick Gale is one of the world’s greatest storytellers. All the characters have unspoken truths. Hugely comforting and an absolute joy to read * Joanna Cannon *There is no judgement here, only humanity. A joy and a lesson for our time * Ann Cleeves *Love Lane moved me greatly. The novel has a great sweep, in its story, and in the richness and vividness of each of its character. This is a book about secrets and lies, yet Gale has such an exact and elegant power as a storyteller that the experience of reading the novel is rousing. I think it wonderful * Christos Tsiolkas *He makes you care about the characters who feel real, and you so badly want the world to treat them with the respect, kindness and attention they deserve * Georgina Moore *A wonderfully hypnotic story of ties and bonds that can be outlawed but not broken. Unputdownable * Denise Mina *He brings a musicality and rootedness to his prose along with a seemingly effortless skill of narrative that makes the work both compelling and rich. Crucially, he reminds us that while social mores and even laws may change, bigotry and brutality often lurk just beneath a polite surface. This is a vital tale, beautifully told * Stella Duffy *An extraordinary creation, one of the most atmospheric and subtly realised novels I’ve read in a long while * James Cahill *Patrick Gale has once again shown us the cracks in the human heart and the bravery of living. He holds decades in paragraphs, years in a sentence, and with perfect economy and discretion allows us to feel how generations face or hide from their foes. This is a beautiful and chiselled novel: prepare to cross the ocean and weep * Tiffany Murray *This is a captivating novel from beginning to end. Beautifully paced, it combines characters that spring immediately to bouncing life, a capacious and compassionate humanity and vividly convincing historical insight. With delicate strands of family story wound expertly into a profoundly involving narrative of passion lost and found, Love Lane traces all the strange and wonderful ways of the heart * Christobel Kent *Nobody is better than Patrick Gale at discovering the extraordinary stories that are hidden in the cracks of ordinary lives, and Love Lane is his finest novel yet: a family history that is full of yearning and as tender as a mother’s embrace * Robert Douglas-Fairhurst *It’s a novel about love in old age, secrecy, a sexless marriage, duty and grief, and parenthood - moving, humane and compelling * Amanda Craig *Probing ideas of belonging, family and escape, Gale is the kind of author who doesn’t let you down * i paper *As ever, Gale powerfully evokes the push-pull of family ties, the anguish of secrets and his belief in true love - whatever its name * Country + Town House *

Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight and now lives on a farm near Land’s End. One of this country’s best-loved novelists, his most recent works are A Place Called Winter, Take Nothing With You and Mother’s Boy. His BBC ‘Queer Britannia’ television drama, Man In An Orange Shirt, was shown to great acclaim in 2017 and won an International Emmy Award.