Quay Words presents: Patrick Gale: Love Lane

About

Were thrilled to past writer-in-residencePatrick Gale back to the Custom House as part of a week of exciting events at Custom House. Patrick will be reading from his latest book Love Lane .

Patricks latest novel draws its title from the first address of his parents long and unusual marriage a street dominated by Wakefields prison, in which his father was head tutor at a training school for prison officers but its also more generally a story of married love, romantic compromise and how sometimes secrets and an ability to keep ones counsel might be key to a relationships enduring. It portrays not only his parents then very new marriage and his grandparents perhaps more romantic one, but revisits the secret marriage imagined, in his bestseller A Place Called Winter , between his great grandfather, Harry Cane, and his husky neighbour, Paul Slaymaker.

About the author

Patrick Gale is the author of seventeen novels and many short stories. He is a keen cellist, gardener, beekeeper and patron of the Charles Causley Trust, and the Penzance LitFest, a trustee of the Penzance Orchestral Society and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives with his husband, the farmer and sculptor, Aidan Hicks, on their farm at the far west of Cornwall. In addition to his latest, Love Lane , which comes out in March 2026, his novels include Mothers Boy , a fictional take on the boyhood and youth of the Cornish poet, Charles Causley, Take Nothing With You , which was his fourth Sunday Times bestseller, Rough Music (2000), Notes From an Exhibition (2007), A Perfectly Good Man (2012) and A Place Called Winter (2015). In 2017 his Man in an Orange Shirt was screened by BBC2 as part of the Gay Britannia season and won the International Emmy for best miniseries. Trafalgar Studios has commissioned a stage play from him based on Take Nothing With You. Extracts from the BBC documentary All Families Have Secrets the Narrative Art of Patrick Gale can be seen on his website www.galewarning.org [https://galewarning.org/]. The full 30 minutes version can be seen by goinghere [https://vimeo.com/257900094?fl=ip&fe=ec] (link to Vimeo) and using the password Bolehyde.

Photo credit: Billie Charity

This event will be in-person at Exeter Custom House. You can find out more about the accessibility of the Custom House here [https://quaywords.org.uk/about/access/]. If you have any access needs youd like to discuss with us before the event you can contact us on quaywords@literatureworks.org.uk. We can offer free carer tickets if you need help to support you to attend.