Review:
Focusing on families' internal relationships, this novel is narrated in the present and at a time 30 years earlier. William is about to go on holiday with his elderly parents to the Cornish seaside bungalow they first visited during his childhood in the 1960s. At that earlier time his mother's secret holiday romance led to a tragedy which set the family on a new course. Today William is also having a secret affair. His mother's dissolving inhibitions due to Alzheimer's disease cause her to reveal this relationship to the one person it will hurt the most. The seismic shock of the revelation shatters the family again. Gale writes vividly about how it feels to be a child in an adult's world, and how families cope with shocks and tragedy. When Julian was a little boy, he and his parents took a family holiday in a cottage in Cornwall. But what should have been a bonding idyll for the solitary, imaginative child, his lonely, unfulfilled mother and his emotionally repressed father turned out to be a dramatic turning point in all their lives. What really happened, and the lifelong consequences of that seaside fortnight, is teased out through this novel which moves between that long-ago holiday and Julian's return visit to the same cottage many years later. Gale skilfully allows the past to illuminate the present, with some dramatic revelations along the way, but his real brilliance as a novelist is his direct, up-close-and -personal focus on his character's inner lives. Julian is gay, but it is not his sexuality, just his choice of partner, that is the cause of his unhappiness. His sister - for reasons we only fully understand towards the end of the book - is nurturing anger and resentment from her childhood. Yet on the surface Julian is popular, happy, successful bookseller and his sibling a contented wife and mother. Their mother is suffering the initial stages of Alzheimer's, and Gale's depiction of the disintegration of her personality is authoritative and believable - and there is something of the cosmic fatalism of grand tragedy in the role she plays in her grown-up children's lives. But Gale's refreshingly honest perception of how lives are really lived - and have to carry on being lived after the big climatic moments - is what makes this book absorbing to read, and haunting long after the last page has been turned.