Rough Music by Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale's fiction has been acclaimed as 'romantic', 'subtle', 'hip', 'brutal', 'superb'. This is his most assured, most accessible novel yet.

ROUGH MUSIC is a family story, covering three generations, starting with idyllic - though definitely strange - childhood, and ending in tragedy.

Julian as a small boy is taken on the perfect Cornish holiday. With the arrival of glamorous American relations emotions run high and events spiral out of control. Though he has been brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, though his parents are neither as normal nor as happy as he supposes, Julian's world view is the sunnily selfish, accepting one of boyhood. It is only when he becomes a man - seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts - that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.

Set mostly on a Cornish beach, against glittering seas, this is a remarkable, wholly recognizable story of the lies which adults tell and of the small acts of treason which a child can commit. Gale presents a compassionate portrayal of the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our believe in love and happiness.