Mother's Boy

From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes MOTHER'S BOY, a superb historical novel of Cornwall, class, desire and two world wars

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.

Author: Patrick Gale

Paperback Published 23 January 2023  265 pages

Published in trade paperback 8 March 2022 

Read and Recommended by Graeme:

"The new book from Patrick Gale is a novel about a real-life person, the Cornish poet Charles Causley who is not well-known to Australian readers. However, this novel is very different to Colm Toibin’s fictional portrait of Thomas Mann in The Magician (also recommended). Mother’s Boy focuses on Charles Causley’s life before he found success as a poet and so it is rather a portrait of the experiences that moulded himthrough childhood, adolescence, as a young man, and also the traumatic ordeal of serving in WWII. But almost as much of the narrative is devoted to his hard-working mother Laura, so the novel is really a dual portrait of mother and son. And as his sexuality was closeted this was the most significant relationship throughout his life - the pair lived together until Laura’s death in 1971. That is not to say that there is nothing of interest here for the gay reader - Gale has imagined likely encounters and relationships from the scraps of biographical information available. Readers who loved Gale’s Costa Award-nominated novel A Place Called Winter will relish this new historical novel. Patrick Gale has lived in Cornwall since 1987 and his deep knowledge and fascination with its history shines through on the page. This is a highly engaging and often witty novel with exceptionally strong characterisation, a vivid sense of time and place, and shot through with a wartime romance that is thwarted by the closet."  

'A writer with heart, soul, and a dark and naughty wit, one whose company you relish and trust' -Observer

'One of the joys of Gale's writing is how even the smallest of characters can appear fully formed, due to a charming wickedness alongside deeper observations' -Irish Times