Rough Music, by Patrick Gale (Flamingo, £9.99 in UK)

A small boy goes on holiday with his family; a gay man brings his parents to the beach for a short break; Rough Music sets the…

A small boy goes on holiday with his family; a gay man brings his parents to the beach for a short break; Rough Music sets the reader's nerves a-jangling as it shifts uneasily back and forth between the two stories, which, of course, are really the same story. Patrick Gale has a way of picking up innocuous things - the sun glittering on a Cornish sea, the eating of an ice cream cone - and giving them an almost sinister significance. Add a subplot based on the escape of train robber Ronnie Biggs from Wandsworth Prison, where Gale's real-life father was governor in the 1960s, and you have a family saga of considerable substance - though it is not by any means, as Gale is careful to point out in an author's note, an autobiography. With an ending as "happy" as that of Cosi Fan Tutte, Rough Music is a stylish study of selfishness and self-delusion.

- Arminta Wallace

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