Mother's Boy

By Patrick Gale,

Book cover of Mother's Boy

Book description

'Tender, evocative' TLS

'Richly engaging' Spectator

A Radio 4 Serial Fiction Book of the Week

'A characteristically tender novel about a young man growing up in the shadow of one war and the whispers of the next' Observer

'A wonderful novel about relationships, particularly between a mother and son. A…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Mother's Boy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is a fictional account mainly of the war-time life of the poet Charles Causley one of my favourite poets. Mr Gale
certainly had a novel approach even if he dropped some clangers about the Navy for example on ship toilets are
called 'heads' but it did not affect my enjoyment.

This is a beautiful, thoughtful treasure of a book that effortlessly taught me so much about life in the first half of 20th-century England.

One unsettling image that stays with me is the fact that when men took leave from the trenches of the First World War, they arrived home unwashed and lousy in the one uniform they had been issued with. I wouldn’t necessarily have picked up an LGBT-labeled book but the sex scenes are few and subtly written: a natural part of the gentle narrative. And how shocking to realise that up until as late as 1967 in…

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