The Whole Day Through

by Patrick Gale

When forty-something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days - and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional touchstone against which she has judged every man since. She's cautious - and he's married - but they can't deny that feelings still exist between them. Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing? Taking its structure from the events of a single summer's day, The Whole Day Through is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing. The Whole Day Through is vintage Gale, displaying the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller Notes From an Exhibition.

(From Publisher).

Patrick Gale was born in 1962, on the Isle of Wight – the unplanned fourth child. His father was the governor of Camp Hill prison and subsequently Wandsworth prison, where Patrick remembers chatting to prisoners through the windows of the mail-bag workshop and to trustees who were allowed to prune his mother's rosebushes. Patrick's mother too had spent much of her life on the periphery of prisons since her father was also a prison governor.
The family was musical and at the age of seven it was discovered that Patrick had a remarkable singing voice. He won a scholarship as one of Winchester Cathedral's historic sixteen Quiristers. They were educated in the cathedral close, alongside the Cathedral's Choristers, in rather archaic circumstances. At the age of thirteen he continued his musical studies as a day boy at Winchester College and his parents became stalwarts of the cathedral community. This ambivalent idyll provided ample material for his fourth novel, Facing the Tank. A keen singer still, he is closely involved with Richard Hickox's cult summer festival at Saint Endellion.
His musical talents were further exercised with the cello and piano, but musical ambitions gave way to his obsession with getting an Equity card once he had spent most of his three years at Oxford neglecting his studies to appear alongside the likes of Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs in a variety of student productions. He was working as a singing waiter in a disastrous all-night restaurant when he completed his first novel, The Aerodynamics of Pork, on the back of his order pad. By the time his agent found a publisher for this novel, a second novel, Ease was finished so the two were published on the same day. By the time he was twenty-eight, Patrick had had seven novels published.
As well as writing and reviewing fiction, he has contributed to various anthologies; written for television; published a biography of Armistead Maupin; written a short history of the Dorchester Hotel and chapters on Mozart's piano and mechanical music for H C Robbins Landon's The Mozart Compendium. Apart from the writing and the music, Patrick is a dedicated bridge player. He lives with his partner, a farmer, in Cornwall, and is as relaxed harvesting cauliflowers as at the bridge table.