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Take Nothing with You
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The Facts of Life
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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German composer Edward Pepper escapes to England just before the war begins in earnest. Struck with TB, he is recuperating in hospital when he meets Sally, a young doctor who has battled her way through medical school, despite the opposition of her parents. They fall in love and marry, settling in the fenlands of East Anglia. Years later, Edward watches as his grandchildren trip up against life and death and realises that patterns can repeat themselves, bringing both pain and unexpected discovery.
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I didn’t want it to end.
- By Anonymous User on 03-10-18
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A Sweet Obscurity
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Bittersweet and startling, A Sweet Obscurity is a novel of childhood, love and the consequences of how lives are lived. Since her mother's death, nine-year-old Dido has been living with her eccentric aunt, acting as peacekeeper between Eliza, her estranged husband, Giles, and his girlfriend. They are each cruelly burdened in different ways. Chance draws them down to Cornwall, where a country idyll offers to lighten their urban cares.
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Friendly Fire
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Insightful and full of understanding and warmth, Patrick Gale's Friendly Fire is a richly compelling story of adolescence, sexuality and the lessons we carry forever. Sophie, an orphan in love with learning, is sure she will thrive in Tatham's, an esteemed boarding school, having survived years of institutional living. But she soon finds herself lost among its cliques and rituals. Befriending two teenage boys, she experiences the first ache of futile love, then a brilliant teacher's inappropriate attention to one of the trio threatens to destroy them all.
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Brilliant
- By Mrs C V Astbury on 30-09-18
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The Aerodynamics of Pork
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Seth, a musical prodigy on the eve of his 16th birthday, is obsessed with sex and with the men he might meet, as well as with his strange family - his arch mother, his beautiful sister and his damaged, distant father. Mo, a policewoman struggling with moral dilemmas and her sexuality in the violent, bigoted police force of the 1980s, wants only to find romance. In this haunting tale of self discovery and hidden identities, Mo and Seth will connect to face unexpected truths about themselves and those they have chosen to love.
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Tree Surgery for Beginners
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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From the best-selling author of A Place Called Winter, Tree Surgery for Beginners is a funny, elegant and eclectic novel of love, lies and the secrets we live with. When Lawrence Frost wakes up one morning to discover his wife and child have gone missing, there is gruesome evidence to suggest he may be the main suspect in a murder investigation. Confused, threatened with the loss of everything he loves, Lawrence is sent to the Caribbean on a kill-or-cure cruise.
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Wide ranging subject matter
- By Jacqueline S. on 15-09-18
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Rough Music
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Truly compelling and rich with emotional insight, Patrick Gale's Cornish novel Rough Music is a beautiful story of a marriage and the secrets a family holds. Julian is a contented if naïve only child, and a holiday on the coast of North Cornwall should be perfect, especially when distant American cousins join the party. But their arrival brings upheaval and unexpected turmoil. It is only as a seemingly well-adjusted adult that Julian is able to reflect on the realities of his parents' marriage and to recognise that the happy, cheerful boyhood he thought was his is infused with secrets, loss and the memory of betrayals that have shaped his life.
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The Facts of Life
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
German composer Edward Pepper escapes to England just before the war begins in earnest. Struck with TB, he is recuperating in hospital when he meets Sally, a young doctor who has battled her way through medical school, despite the opposition of her parents. They fall in love and marry, settling in the fenlands of East Anglia. Years later, Edward watches as his grandchildren trip up against life and death and realises that patterns can repeat themselves, bringing both pain and unexpected discovery.
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I didn’t want it to end.
- By Anonymous User on 03-10-18
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A Sweet Obscurity
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bittersweet and startling, A Sweet Obscurity is a novel of childhood, love and the consequences of how lives are lived. Since her mother's death, nine-year-old Dido has been living with her eccentric aunt, acting as peacekeeper between Eliza, her estranged husband, Giles, and his girlfriend. They are each cruelly burdened in different ways. Chance draws them down to Cornwall, where a country idyll offers to lighten their urban cares.
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Friendly Fire
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Insightful and full of understanding and warmth, Patrick Gale's Friendly Fire is a richly compelling story of adolescence, sexuality and the lessons we carry forever. Sophie, an orphan in love with learning, is sure she will thrive in Tatham's, an esteemed boarding school, having survived years of institutional living. But she soon finds herself lost among its cliques and rituals. Befriending two teenage boys, she experiences the first ache of futile love, then a brilliant teacher's inappropriate attention to one of the trio threatens to destroy them all.
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Brilliant
- By Mrs C V Astbury on 30-09-18
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The Aerodynamics of Pork
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Seth, a musical prodigy on the eve of his 16th birthday, is obsessed with sex and with the men he might meet, as well as with his strange family - his arch mother, his beautiful sister and his damaged, distant father. Mo, a policewoman struggling with moral dilemmas and her sexuality in the violent, bigoted police force of the 1980s, wants only to find romance. In this haunting tale of self discovery and hidden identities, Mo and Seth will connect to face unexpected truths about themselves and those they have chosen to love.
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Tree Surgery for Beginners
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the best-selling author of A Place Called Winter, Tree Surgery for Beginners is a funny, elegant and eclectic novel of love, lies and the secrets we live with. When Lawrence Frost wakes up one morning to discover his wife and child have gone missing, there is gruesome evidence to suggest he may be the main suspect in a murder investigation. Confused, threatened with the loss of everything he loves, Lawrence is sent to the Caribbean on a kill-or-cure cruise.
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Wide ranging subject matter
- By Jacqueline S. on 15-09-18
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Rough Music
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Truly compelling and rich with emotional insight, Patrick Gale's Cornish novel Rough Music is a beautiful story of a marriage and the secrets a family holds. Julian is a contented if naïve only child, and a holiday on the coast of North Cornwall should be perfect, especially when distant American cousins join the party. But their arrival brings upheaval and unexpected turmoil. It is only as a seemingly well-adjusted adult that Julian is able to reflect on the realities of his parents' marriage and to recognise that the happy, cheerful boyhood he thought was his is infused with secrets, loss and the memory of betrayals that have shaped his life.
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A Perfectly Good Man
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Devastatingly moving and full of psychological insight, A Perfectly Good Man is a warm, humane Cornish novel from the best-selling author of A Place Called Winter. On a clear, crisp summer's day in Cornwall, a young man carefully prepares to take his own life and asks family friend John Barnaby to pray with him. Barnaby - priest, husband and father - has always tried to do good, though life hasn't always been rosy. Lenny's request poses problems, not just for Barnaby but for his wife and family and the wider community, as the secrets of the past push themselves forcefully into the present for all to see.
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Love Is Blind
- By: William Boyd
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Love Is Blind by William Boyd. Love Is Blind is William Boyd's sweeping, heart-stopping new novel. Set at the end of the 19th century, it follows the fortunes of Brodie Moncur, a young Scottish musician, about to embark on the story of his life. When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum.
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Boyd on Top Form
- By Mark on 27-09-18
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The Cat Sanctuary
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Judith shares her life with her partner, Joanna, on the lonely wilds of Bodmin Moor, far from the memories and trauma of her childhood. But when Judith's sister, Deborah, is tragically widowed, the women agree to meet. And what is intended to be a harmonious reunion turns into an entanglement of resentment, jealousy and desire, as aspects of the past force themselves into an uneasy present, with some surprising results.
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Transcription
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Fenella Woolgar
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1940, 18-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.
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Full Marks Kate
- By Amazon Customer on 09-09-18
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A Ladder to the Sky
- By: John Boyne
- Narrated by: Richard E. Grant, Laurence Kennedy, Richard Cordery, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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If you look hard enough, you can find stories pretty much anywhere. They don’t even have to be your own. Or so would-be writer Maurice Swift decides very early on in his career. A chance encounter in a Berlin hotel with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann gives him an opportunity to ingratiate himself with someone more powerful than him. For Erich is lonely, and he has a story to tell. Whether or not he should do so is another matter entirely. Once Maurice has made his name, he sets off in pursuit of other people’s stories. He doesn’t care where he finds them - or to whom they belong - as long as they help him rise to the top.
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Stunning start which descends onto silliness
- By the typist on 25-08-18
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Little Bits of Baby
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Eight years ago, Robin fled from his family, friends, and entire life to suffer a complete breakdown in an island monastery. Now he's reconnecting with those he left behind: his mother and father, with their own small secrets, and Jake and Candida, both of whom were impossibly close to Robin when he disappeared. But while the people he abandoned have missed him, Robin finds that everything has changed. He alone can decide what he will do in this new world of resentment, possibility and triumphant love....
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Bitter Orange
- By: Claire Fuller
- Narrated by: Rachel Bavidge
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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From the attic of a dilapidated English country house, she sees them - Cara first: dark and beautiful, clinging to a marble fountain of Cupid, and Peter, an Apollo. It is 1969, and they are spending the summer in the rooms below hers while Frances writes a report on the follies in the garden for the absent American owner. But she is distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she discovers a peephole which gives her access to her neighbours' private lives.
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Brilliant slow burner.
- By Rhian jones on 09-11-18
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Facing the Tank
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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American Professor Evan Kirby, moving to Barrowcester to research paradise after a successful book on hell, expects a very English cathedral society of gentle clergymen and coffee mornings. What he finds instead is a town thrown into chaos by strange, supernatural events, scandalous pregnancies and a Satanic summoning of a young feral girl.
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Clock Dance
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was 11 and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at 21, the accident that would make her a widow at 41. At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman - and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog - will lead Willa into uncharted territory....
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Beautiful - as you'd expect from such a fine write
- By Liz Scully on 19-07-18
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Unsheltered
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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2016 Vineland. Meet Willa Knox, a woman who stands braced against the vicissitudes of her shattered life and family - and the crumbling house that contains her. 1871 Vineland. Thatcher Greenwood, the new science teacher, is a fervent advocate of the work of Charles Darwin, and he is keen to communicate his ideas to his students. But those in power in Thatcher's small town have no desire for a new world order. Thatcher and his teachings are not welcome. Both Willa and Thatcher resist the prevailing logic. Both are asked to pay a high price for their courage.
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Over-stuffed with good things
- By Rachel Redford on 29-10-18
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Dangerous Pleasures
- By: Patrick Gale
- Narrated by: Patrick Gale
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Gentle, witty and sometimes disturbing, Dangerous Pleasures is Patrick Gale's first collection of much-loved short stories. A funeral party ends in an unexpected manner; parents are faced with difficult decisions about their daughter; a housewife transforms her personality with a simple touch-up; a father's trip to his former school brings back memories of love he thought buried forever.
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Middle England
- By: Jonathan Coe
- Narrated by: Rory Kinnear
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change.
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Highly absorbing 'political Gogglebox'
- By K. J. Noyes on 17-11-18
Summary
From the best-selling author of A Place Called Winter comes a new novel of boyhood, coming of age, and the confusions of desire and reality. For all readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement or L P Hartley's The Go-Between.
1970s Weston-Super-Mare, and 10-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.
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- the typist
- 03-09-18
Great start, then meandering middle and muddled end.
I like Patrick Gale’s writing a lot. When he’s on form he’s riveting. This, to me, is a curate’s egg of a story however. After a tremendous start involving an HIV positive man navigating online dating it quickly devolves into a meandering riff on cello lessons/childhood recollections before bizarrely heading up a cul de sac of nonsense about conversion therapy. In isolation any one of these topics could have made a great book, but they simply don’t hang together as a cohesive novel. And I wish he’d get a decent narrator to read his books. His voice is flat and his array of accents belie a dreadful sense of snobbery. Every working class woman sounds like some sort sex crazed Eastenders reject!
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Simon Palmour
- 23-10-18
Perfect storytelling
I could have done without the present-day framing, but otherwise it has some of the most beautiful writing I can remember.
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- Amazon Customer
- 18-09-18
Breathtaking!
A superbly authentic and empathic novel, brilliantly read by the author. Certainly the best I have "read" this year of its genre and one I am unlikely ever to forget. I suspect I will be revisiting this one more than once in the future. Surely a modern classic and certainly rewards at so many levels. Not the first I have read by Patrick Gale, but I will now be exploring many more.
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- Moondew
- Worthing UK
- 13-09-18
Music to your ears
This book begins and ends with Eustace who, with or without his cello, somehow survived the ups and downs of life in calm and measured manner. A book which should be read twice. With Bach's cello concerto.
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- Anonymous User
- 11-09-18
I didn’t want it to end.
The best book I’ve read or listened to in ages. Patrick’s voice is sublime. I will miss Eustace, I wanted the story to go on and on. Thank you Patrick.
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- TJ
- 01-09-18
First ever audio book
i have read lots of Patrick Gales books but this was my first audio book.... a strange experience at first, but once I lost my own reading voice I got into it. in fact it's very relaxing to be read to so a new discovery.
The book is great, a well written coming of age story. Loved the central character Eustace and particularly enjoyed the chapters where the world opened up to him in Bristol.
Highly recommended!
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- Gaye I.
- 28-08-18
Gut Strings
I liked the ‘now,’ wine and cake. I liked the ‘past,’ packing a pair of sandals. I liked the ‘future’ plucked from the ether ( the internet) and the possibility that in 24 hours life could change for the better, amidst the uncertainty of cancer. ‘May it be’ by 2Cellos.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful