Join us for an evening with bestselling author Patrick Gale as he talks about his new novel Mother’s Boy, a tender story of love, loss and a life hiding in plain sight.
Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura’s husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius.
As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.
Mother’s Boy is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.
Mother’s Boy is Patrick’s seventeenth novel and his first fully historical one since A Place Called Winter. It is based around the known facts of the boyhood and youth of the great Cornish poet, Charles Causley and the life of the mother who raised him singlehandedly. We’re delighted that one of our favourite authors is making a welcome return to Oswestry!
Tickets: £8 without book (Admits One, ticket redeemable against a signed copy of Mother's Boy) or £20 with book (Admits One, includes a signed copy of Mother's Boy).