'Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude'

Ease

Ease

Patrick Gale

A novel about downsizing from a life of ease and upgrading to one of sleaze.

Many people would kill to be Domina Tey. She’s one of life’s successes: an award-winning playwright living in a beautiful house with an equally celebrated writer. But she isn’t happy. Life is too easy. It’s becoming stultifying, negating her creative force.

She decides upon a spell of sleazy living to give both her work and her soul a spring-clean – and elopes with her typewriter in search of just a hint of degradation. She finds it in Bayswater, and safe in bedsit land she immediately sets about getting to know her neighbours. However, her careless plotting of their lives leads to consequences both tragic and deliciously entertaining.

Reviews of Ease

    • ‘A quick-thinking book by an author who has something to say’ Guardian
    • ‘Patrick Gale writes with the understated fluency that is the hallmark of contemporary British fiction, and with the irony that usually accompanies it. Like William Boyd and Martin Amis, he skilfully blends the light and the dark, moving unobtrusively from comedy to drama without losing narrative momentum or integrity’ Book World
    • ‘A sleek and silky novel’ Boston Sunday Globe
    • ‘Ease is a second novel by a young Briton whose gifts and insights are notable’ International Herald Tribune
    • ‘Captivating. A novel that pleads to be read at a single sitting’ Publishers Weekly

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