#Little bits website full
#Little bits website series

Iris Murdoch is the doyenne of this technique, but Patrick Gale employs it with considerable success in his fifth novel. Take a small group of people whose lives are all more or less enmeshed, add a divisive element and watch the ensuing chaos.

#Little bits website full

Sharp insights into a thoroughly modern marriage.Ī wonderful modern comedy of manners, neatly crafted and full of compassion for all its most foiblesome cast. This is a witty book with more than a touch of satire, but which deals with love, pain, death and laughter with an extraordinary depth of understanding.Īs long as you don’t find a book that makes you laugh and cry unacceptably manipulative, it’s an ideal way to round off a gourmet evening. … Savage, satirical, often very funny, this highly readable comedy of middle class manners is written by a young author of boundless talent. Love, death, the decay of friendship, the triumph of love – all the big themes are here in small doses, cunningly plotted and skilfully interwoven by Patrick Gale, who writes like Iris Murdoch on pep pills. One of two public figures with whom, on the basis of their works alone, I would very much like to go to bed… The isolation of blindness and madness, as well as the concealment of same-sex love, are explored with sensitivity and humour. Every character and setting pulses with charged detail and dramatises the various kinds of love and guilt that grow between parents and children, men and women, and men and men.

#Little bits website series

Robin is the catalyst behind a taut series of events that unfolds with the rhythm and control of a good mystery. Richly anarchic, immensely accomplished and enormously moving, Little Bits of Baby is a real treat.Ī richly comic novel about the equilibrium of urban lives and loves upset by an outsider. His message seems to be that love and simplicity can repair even the most chaotic lives and that generosity and flexibility are the way to happiness after disaster. Patrick Gale writes with great charm and kindliness, warmth and humour.

The book’s full of sharply observed human surprises and discoveries. Paperback: .uk | Hive | WaterstonesĮBook: Amazon Kindle | iBookstore (UK) | Kobo Read an extract from Little Bits of Baby (Kindle Preview) To order your copy through and thus support local bookshops click here.

Whelm, the unorthodox male community that has been sheltering Robin when the novel begins would be invoked again in The Facts of Lifewhere we visit its sister community of women, Corry. Written in the full flush of new love, overshadowed by the onset of AIDS among several of his friends, this is at once an intensely romantic novel – heavily influenced by Patrick’s compulsive reading of Iris Murdoch and full of a sense of possibility – and a narrative shot through with a sense of mortality and the preciousness of fleeting joy. Viewed in another, he’s a human time bomb, unhinged, resentful, heedless of whom he hurts and brooding over unfinished emotional business involving Jake, the sexy husband.īut life in a Gale narrative is never simple and the man who might have proved Candida’s nemesis meets a romantic nemesis of his own in the shape of Faber, a painter and gay father. Viewed in one light Robin is the perfect candidate, given that he has withdrawn from the world to a remote island monastery. She tries to fill it by announcing that the baby is to be christened and that she wants her childhood friend, Robin to be a godfather. Candida is a breakfast television presenter with a sweet baby, a fairly sweet little boy and a sexy husband in advertising but her profile is waning and she begins to suspect a spiritual void in her life.