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Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale review – a young cellist’s coming of age

An evocative exploration of the joy and pain playing an instrument can bring that echoes the author’s musical youth

E ustace, a London property developer in his early 50s, has been locked in a lead-lined room. In order to combat thyroid cancer, he must ingest a radioactive iodine tablet and spend 24 hours in isolation sweating out the effects. He has been instructed to take nothing into the radiation suite that cannot be left behind. To stave off boredom he has brought with him a cheap, disposable MP3 player loaded with cello music.

Patrick Gale ’s novel is as elegiac and contemplative as one might expect, given a central character who has nothing to do except sit and listen to cello sonatas. Had he not become a writer, Gale might have been a musician. As a promising youngster he was selected to attend courses at the International Cello Centre, a residential school in the Scottish borders, where his contemporaries included Steven Isserlis. It was partly thanks to Isserlis’s encouragement that Gale took up the instrument again for pleasure in his 40s.

The young Eustace’s story is very similar to Gale’s even if the setting is fictional. Gale grew up in Winchester but Eustace lives in Weston-super-Mare, where his parents run a retirement home. Gale evocatively presents 1970s Weston as a transient world of estuary mud and trifle made with tinned mandarin segments, though it is clear from the outset that Eustace doesn’t fit in here. For a start, he plays the cello, an instrument whose ungainliness seems to engender a premature sense of responsibility: “It was quite heavy but the weightiness was part of the adult burden he was to take on.” Then there is the fact that he doesn’t have the usual reaction to the porn magazines passed around class. Rather than finding the pictures arousing, Eustace would “linger on extraneous details … a macrame pot holder he would have liked in his own room”.

This limited cultural horizon expands when he begins to study with charismatic teacher Carla Gold, who lives with some gay friends in a bohemian enclave of Bristol. Here Eustace is exposed to art, literature and the perfect recipe for tomato sauce – as well as discovering the true meaning of suffering for one’s art when he is instructed in the technique of thumb position (a means of extending the cello’s high register often likened to pressing down on cheese wire).

Eustace’s progress is so promising that he secures a place at a summer school run by the inspiring if irascible Jean Curwen (a thinly disguised portrait of the guru Jane Cowan who taught Gale and Isserlis). Here he receives his first same-sex kiss, but also recognises that he won’t make the grade as a top-flight professional.

It is worth noting that, for his 16th novel, Gale has revisited the subject matter of his first, The Aerodynamics of Pork , published in 1985. On his website, Gale dismisses this early work as “over-written and under-edited”, but it featured a teenage gay violin prodigy named Seth, whose precocious ability to convey emotions beyond his years strikes his mother – a cello teacher – as almost disturbing: “Passion could no more be compassed by dexterity alone than a ten-year-old could be expected to understand the vagaries of lust, but when Evelyn first heard him play Brahms she had been as shocked as if her son had gravely proposed incest.”

Eustace develops into a richer, more engaging character than Seth precisely because he does not possess the nonchalant abilities of a born prodigy. For example, his teacher frets that he lacks the emotional experience required to play Rachmaninov: “Regret. The whole movement expresses regret. One day you’ll understand the kind of thing he means, but for now, just think of how you feel when you remember a perfect day that you can never, ever have again.”

Above all, Gale makes it clear that playing the cello is tough. Eustace’s most impressive quality is his stoicism – the instrument acts as a shield from drab, depressing Weston as his parents’ marriage and their shabby retirement home are falling apart. His dedication is such that he’s prepared to endure any amount of discomfort: “He decided the pain in his thumb was like the necessary agony of young ballerinas learning to dance on pointes, aspiring to grace even as their shoe tips filled with blood”.

Even if these qualities ultimately fail to pave the way for a professional career, they stand Eustace in good stead once he emerges from the lead-lined room. Take Nothing With You poignantly illustrates the curse of being born with musical talent but lacking the essential spark of genius, yet is suffused with the joy and wisdom of Gale’s mid-life reconnection with music.

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Tue 13 Aug 2024

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Take Nothing with You by Patrick Gale, review: a balm for the soul

I always look forward to Patrick Gale’s novels. This time around, my anticipation was increased when I heard that Take Nothing With You would explore the same territory as my latest book: the emotional impact music can make on a young gay man navigating the challenges of life. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a wonderful, intelligent and enriching novel.

It opens with the central character, Eustace, aged 50 and living in London. His soulmate died years ago and he’s single after being dumped by a subsequent partner who infected him with HIV. He now lives with a whippet called Joyce and plays cello in a mediocre amateur orchestra.

When he joins a dating app, he meets a much younger man, who is an army officer posted in the Middle East – but just before the pair are due to meet, Eustace is diagnosed with cancer and goes into hospital for treatment. There, he listens to some cello music which transports him back to his youth.

Read more: The 30 best books to take on holiday this summer

We then meet Eustace at the age of 10 in his home town of Weston-super-Mare, where he lives in an old people’s home with an aloof, difficult mother who is scarred by the loss of twin daughters, and a father whose relentless perkiness masks the pain of losing three brothers in the War. At school, Eustace is shy, bad at sports and feels like he doesn’t fit in. When he takes an interest in ballet, his father wants to stamp it out and encourages him to take up a musical instrument instead.

After seeing a cello recital, Eustace is intrigued. When glamorous soloist Carla Gold becomes his teacher, he is entranced. Once she introduces him to Ivan, his first cello, he’s hooked. “Ivan is your friend,” she tells him, “and first position is your home. When you’re not dancing with Ivan, you’ll feel bereft, and when you’re not in first position, you’ll be on an adventure.”

Carla opens the door to a bohemian world in which “the arts came before everything, including the obligation to be normal”. She encourages Eustace to play the cello in a way that sets his soul free, and music becomes his escape – an emotional support that helps him cope with bereavement, disappointment, sexual awakening, emotional discovery, tragedy and betrayal. It allows him to discover and then become the person he wants to be.

The plot of Take Nothing With You bounces between the two timeframes and is often surprising, with an unexpectedly dark plot twist towards the end. The narrative voice is wry and witty, and there are some lovely observations and period detail.

Standout scenes include an awkward sex education lesson in prep school and an audition for the music scholarship at a local public school, while the chapters that cover the first time Eustace leaves home to go to a Scottish summer programme are particularly strong.

Read more:  Man in an Orange Shirt: A heartwrenching reminder of the perils of conformity

Gale draws his protagonist with compassion and empathy, and the book is populated by some terrific supporting characters, such as former star cellist Naomi, who had to give up performing because of stage fright and becomes a surrogate sibling in Eustace’s life.

Ultimately, it is a forceful reminder of the emotional power of music. As Eustace is told by his teacher at summer school: “Music knits. It heals. It is balm to the soul.” The same could be said for this book.

Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale is published by Tinder Press, £18.99;  Matt Cain is the author of ‘The Madonna Of Bolton’ , published by Unbound (£12.99)

Read more on Books :  Bonkbusters taught me everything I know about sex – and sex scenes, too My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, book review: a magnificent satire The Wives by Lauren Weisberger, book review: ‘Real depth beneath its shiny surface’  

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Judith McKinnon

writer, reviewer and all-round bookworm

Book Review: Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale

I thought this novel was going to be about a man facing down cancer, but it’s actually a coming of age story, bracketed by what might be a very treatable cancer diagnosis and a new relationship. And music. I love novels that take you on a journey of your own. With Take Nothing With You , I found myself visiting YouTube to discover or rediscover the beautiful cello pieces described in the book.

Eustace lives with his parents in an elegant inherited house in Weston-Super-Mare. His parents run it as a rest home, which makes for Eustace, their only child, an unusual childhood. While he must be quiet and not disturb the guests, he is also left a lot to his own devices. It’s a family living in a kind of genteel poverty; they never go away on holiday because they live at a seaside resort – what could be nicer?

As he grows up, a cello concert is a revelation and brings Carla, his new music teacher into his family’s world. Carla is warm and intuitive, passionate and generous. She spots a talent in Eustace and fosters it, as well as striking up a fond friendship with Eustace’s apparently friendless mother. You get a lot of music detail as Eustace learns about fingering and the complexities of playing solo or with a group. If you like classical music this is really interesting and Gale has the insight of an accomplished musician. As Eustace develops musically, he also becomes aware of his sexuality and this forms another thread in the story.

Eustace is a sensitive character who always seems to be just missing out. At the start of the book he has just fallen in love, while receiving a cancer diagnosis. His education is full of missteps as well. The reader wants him to reach out and grab life with both hands. In the background, his parents’ restrictive lifestyle, strains upon their marriage, his mother’s moment of recklessness all affect the story in interesting and dramatic ways.

Patrick Gale writes with warmth and wit creating a brilliant story arc that captures the man that is Eustace, as well as the boy. The subordinate characters are just as interesting, each empathetic in their own way. And the settings: the Somerset seafront town, the music school in Scotland, plus the 1970s, are evocatively created here too. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to read this, but it was a complete joy because Gale is such a beautiful writer. And I am delighted to see that he has a new novel out early next year. This one scores a four and a half out of five from me.

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Patrick Gale

Take nothing with you (2018).

Leaving your childhood behind is easier said than done…

Take Nothing With You is a sad-funny comedy of resilience and survival. Fifty-something Eustace, a gay Londoner of leisure, realises in the same week that he has fallen hopelessly in love with a man he has yet to meet in the flesh, and that he has cancer of the thyroid. While being given radioactive iodine therapy, which involves spending a little over 24 hours in a lead-lined hospital suite wearing only disposable clothes and with no possessions he doesn’t mind leaving behind, he listens to hour on hour of cello music recorded for him by his best mate, Naomi. This sets his memories circling back to the 1970s and his eccentric boyhood and adolescence in his parents’ old people’s home in Weston-Super-Mare, and how his life was transfigured and his family’s stability shattered, by the decision to attend a recital by the glamorous cellist, Carla Gold.

His fourth Sunday Times bestseller, Patrick’s sixteenth novel is at once a very modern look at sexuality and intimate betrayal and a subversive homage to the novels of Noel Streatfeild and L P Hartley. It came about because he was called upon to visit Weston-Super-Mare to read in the library there and was struck by what a strange and melancholy place it would be to grow up in, but it rapidly developed into a nostalgic examination of his boyhood experience of the transformative powers of music, at the hands of inspiring teachers and in particular through holiday courses he attended at the International Cello Centre run by the late, great, Jane Cowan.

To order the book through bookshop.org and thus support local bookshops click here .

Patrick has recorded the audiobook and you can hear an extract by clicking here .

To hear Patrick unveiling the novel at a very giggly evening at Damian Barr’s literary salon earlier in the summer, click here .

To hear a six star review on Ireland‘s RTE Arena show, click here . (Spoiler alert, but the reviewer’s enthusiasm is infectious!)

To hear a Spotify playlist of most of the cello pieces featured in the novel, click here .

“So delighted to be sent a copy of this wonderful wonderful novel. Gale has done it again. Absolutely one of his complete best. So many funny and tender and terrific scenes. The recreation of music, one of the hardest things that can be done, is managed so well. Gale pulls off that Forsterian trick of hovering between social comedy and apocalyptic tragedy without the move appearing artificial or contrived. Just a wonderful wonderful read. Couldn’t bear the sight of the pages on the left thickening up and the pages on the right thinning out as I came to the end …” Stephen Fry.

“I loved the book. I wanted it to go on for ever- he’s captured the loneliness and camaraderie of being a teenage musician so perfectly. I loved how the big decision to pursue music or not unravelled itself so naturally and how in the end Eustace was completely at peace with it. This, surrounding the completely devastating treatment of him by his mother is kind of like the Schubert slow movement wrapping itself around the turbulent middle section.” Rachel Nicholls, Soprano

“A compelling story of how a passion for music can be a gateway for self-discovery.” Jonathan Dove, Composer

“Joyous and full of light… A beautiful and empathetic writer.” Cathy Rentzenbrink

“Sexy, joyous, funny and tender. I relished it.”  Sarah Winman

“A wonderful gift of a book from one of the best writers working today.” S J Watson

Publisher: Tinder Press ISBN: 9781472205339

Read an extract

Read an extract from Take Nothing With You (Kindle Preview)

Buy Take Nothing With You

Paperback: Amazon.co.uk | Hive | Waterstones | Booktopia.au

eBook: Amazon Kindle | iBookstore (UK) | Kobo

Audiobook: Audible

Take Nothing With You is now available in the US as an eBook

Reviews of take nothing with you.

In a pleasing nod to Marcel Proust, Eustace, the middle-aged protagonist of Patrick Gale’s new novel, is propelled into memories of his childhood by a piece of music. An online flirtation via Skype with a much younger serving soldier is beginning to consume his thoughts, at least until a health crisis looms. Telling Theo nothing about his cancer diagnosis, Eustace goes for radio-active iodine therapy, having been warned to bring nothing with him that he doesn’t mind throwing away after. Saint-Saens’s ‘The Swan’ drifting through on his MP3 player leads him to relive his boyhood as a devoted cellist, and to reflect which parts of his past can also now be discarded.

While Eustace lies in his hospital suite, the bulk of the novel deals with memories of his musical and sexual awakening. The first comes at the hands of two charismatic teachers, Carla Gold and Jean Curwen; the second via his eccentric schoolfriend Vernon and the array of classic gay texts lent him by Carla’s flatmate. Leather-clad Louis, to the boy’s astonishment, has somehow ‘recognised and greeted his secret self’. But of the two passions, it’s the cello that is most urgent.

Young Eustace lives in an old folks’ home in Weston-super-Mare (downside: silence and the hovering presence of death; upside: cakes every day at 4pm). His mother is undemonstrative and distant, his father unnaturally jolly. Taken on as a pupil by the glamorous cellist Carla Gold, Eustace relishes his access to a place where art counts for everything. The account of Eustace’s journey into the intricacies of playing, up to the terrifying peaks of the mysterious ‘thumb position’, is thoroughly absorbing. He enters an even more rarefied world when he’s accepted on a distinguished residential course. But what sort of player (read: person) will he end up being? Jean’s keenest disapproval is for the performer who ‘does not play well with others’.

Various people Eustace encounters, not just cellists, turn out not to play well with others, while stars are found in surprising places. When finally he’s horrifyingly betrayed, he has the inner resources — and outward alliances — to cope. Funny and heartfelt, Take Nothing With You deserves a place on Louis’s bookshelf, alongside Edmund White, James Baldwin and Genet. But on the jacket the cellist Steven Isserlis calls this ‘a musical novel by a real musician’, which I suspect will please Gale far more than any mere critic’s praise.

The Spectator

Eustace is middle-aged, musical, HIV-positive and living with his whippet Joyce, when life springs good and bad surprises. First, he finds new love with an army officer serving in the Middle East; and second, he learns that he has cancer. Going into a lead-lined room for radiotherapy, he is told to bring only things that he won’t mind leaving behind. Among his few possessions is an MP3 player of cello music from his friend Naomi. It sets him thinking back over his life, especially his unhappy teens in Weston-super-Mare, where his parents ran an old people’s home and his mother grew increasingly disturbed. Salvation comes in the form of a cello teacher, who opens up a new realm where he meets a bohemian circle, finds his sexuality and, above all, applies himself seriously to music. Gale has a devoted following, with 19 novels under his belt since The Aerodynamics of Pork, in 1985. This warm and humane novel, stopping just short of sentimentality, is not only about love but also the value of art.

Sunday Times

Eustace is glowing. It’s not so much his medication – although the cancer-zapping pill he has just taken would get a Geiger counter going – as his mood. After months of virtual dating, he’s about to meet his online squeeze, Theo, some 20 years his junior.

The timing isn’t great. Having reached “an age when he was reassured that life was unlikely to surprise him any further”, Eustace had been firmly set for proverbial pipe and slipperdom, not life-changing encounters with beautiful men in army fatigues. And the fact that he’s “quite possibly dying” may put a dampener on his first real-life date. (He hasn’t even told Theo he’s in hospital.)

For all this, Patrick Gale’s hero remains upbeat, almost relishing the 24 hours of solitude enforced by his radioactive cancer treatment. Using the hospital isolation room as a kind of vortex, the novel moves between Eustace’s unexpected mid-life romance and his teenage years in run-down Weston-super-Mare.

Take Nothing With You marks a move from Gale’s beloved Cornish landscape, but it’s also a return of sorts. While his Costa-shortlisted A Place Called Winter transported readers to the Canadian prairies, this captivating novel, Gale’s 18th, shows him to be better than ever, and is closer to home. A deeply autobiographical work, it draws on his own experiences of sexuality, music and childhood trauma.

An only son living in a family-run old people’s home, Eustace takes cello lessons with the spellbindingly bohemian Carla Gold (think Jacqueline du Pré meets Bruno Tonioli, in florals). His gift takes him to the edge of the professional musical world – in the holidays, he learns alongside a group of equally talented child musicians. Flaunting their perfect pitch or “casually demoralising” each other with “a cascade of Vivaldi”, Gale’s players are spiky and precocious, like so many musical versions of Noel Streatfeild’s small ballet stars.

L P Hartley’s The Go-Between is a more explicit literary touchstone – and, as with that classic, the book’s tension hinges on how much, or how little, a child knows about the grown-ups. It’s not long before Eustace finds himself an unwitting player in the messiness of adult lives, with all their forbidden love affairs, marital discord, and unspoken truths. The plot is tight, and the surprises keep coming. But the journey is reflective as well as dramatic. Gale encourages us to think not just about the rifts between people, but also about the contradictory versions of ourselves.

The past may well be, as Hartley said, a foreign country, but most of us don’t get through its customs without a holdall of mental souvenirs – and some of them are pretty ugly. Cursed with a selfish, unbalanced and “depressingly indestructible” mother, Eustace has quite a bit to shoulder. The image of a cello-lugging teen-hero, trudging the streets like a mini-Atlas, is the book’s leitmotif. But just as that instrument brings light as well as weight, Gale’s novel is generously optimistic. It shows how our past shapes us, but suggests that we can make something from the emotional burdens that we bear. It also illuminates the idea that it’s OK not to be perfect.

It’s hard to make writing feel this easy and compelling. Gale’s translucent prose and subtle structuring are artful but never showy. (It’s a gift he shares with Anthony Trollope, who gets a few fond hat tips here, not least in the title.) It’s also very sexy. Passionate, appetitive, flirtatious, Gale can write of the mind, but he also gets the body – from the bat-squeak of arousal in a London club, to the heady musk of teenage fumblings in a bed of “ivy, discarded crisp packets and used condoms”. Food is given its due, too, from stroopwafels to a step-by-step recipe for pasta sauce that ensures “you will never lack friends”. Gale is an accomplished cellist, and the sound of music is described with just enough detail to make you seek it out.

As he walks out of the isolation suite, Eustace takes nothing with him. Hospital regs dictate that his T-shirt, boxers, and even the cheap MP3 player of cello music, must go into the bin. Loved ones can look, but not, until the radiation wears off, touch, as if he’s stuck behind a glass screen. I closed the book with a similar sense of longing. Eustace – who had become flesh and blood – was now beyond my grasp. It’s a novel that evokes the most precious of feelings, the feeling of falling, of not wanting things to end. Read it once, fast. Then again, savouring the story. And stop and listen to the music as you go.

Sophie Ratcliffe

Daily Telegraph

A lovely and lyrical coming of age tale.

Sunday Express

Gale creates characters you can’t help but love, and a story you have no choice but to get lost in. ***** (Isabelle Broom)

Patrick Gale plays the modern and baroque cello and while you don’t have to be musical to enjoy this well-crafted novel, it would help. Eustace is a cellist, a gardener and a gay bachelor in his early 50s, living a comfortable, leisurely life in London.

He is searching for a new love but just when he makes a connection with Theo, a soldier serving in Afghanistan, he discovers that he has thyroid cancer. After an operation Eustace is administered a highly radioactive drug to clear up cancerous traces so he has to spend 24 hours in isolation.

These hours give him the opportunity to review his strange, lonely upbringing, briefly redeemed by music. This is a rite-of-passage novel where we see Eustace emerge from childhood through confused adolescence to adulthood.

An only child Eustace was raised in an old people’s home run by his unhappily married parents in the depressed seaside town of Weston-super-Mare. Both appear detached from their son, his father’s constant attempts at humour disguising the deeper misery which is etched on his mother’s face.

Eustace is bullied at his prep school, but his life is transformed when he begins to learn the cello with Carla Gold, an accomplished performer and teacher, and discovers that he has a rare talent. He joins “the blessed circle of the musical… for whom nothing was as important as music” and shares its joy with other young performers.

Each Friday his mother takes him to stay with Carla and the gay male couple with whom she lives, an experience which opens up new horizons for both Eustace and his mother.

With his parents struggling financially the cello offers him the chance of a music scholarship to an independent school where his interest will be celebrated. But as he begins to acknowledge the fact that he is gay a series of family disasters have profound consequences.

Having built up the tension stealthily Gale rushes to a slightly abrupt conclusion but that is a small caveat. This is an emotionally charged and humane tale beautifully conveying a child’s partial view of the world.

VANESSA BERRIDGE

Daily Express

Patrick Gale’s  Take Nothing With You  begins with a hero in crisis. Eustace, aged 50 and HIV-positive, has cancer and is on the brink of falling in love. His only close friend is Naomi, a brilliant cellist who has given up performing. Eustace was once a cellist too and music was his escape from a peculiar childhood — he grew up in an old people’s home in Weston-super-Mare. He returns to the past to tell the whole story.

Into the life of young Eustace — and the life of his disappointed, controlling mother — comes a bohemian cello teacher, and the confused boy is shown a new and bewildering world of adult emotions. There is a natural warmth to Gale’s writing and, without losing sympathy with his dotty characters, he is very amusing.

Patrick Gale is one those rare writers whose work is well-reviewed and popular. Take Nothing With You is Gale’s 16th novel, and when you add two short story collections and numerous screenplays, it strikes me there aren’t many gay authors, writing about the gay experience, as prolific and successful as he, anywhere in the world.

Not unusually for an author with this body of work, we find familiar themes. Take Nothing With You is a coming-of-gay-age drama and like last year’s original BBC mini-series, Man in the Orange Shirt , there’s the exploration of the gay experience in the past and present playing out in two timelines. Another familiarity, a recent Galian twist, if you like, is that, in the past, those who are at war with their sexuality are family members of the novel’s gay hero. In Man in the Orange Shirt a gay character struggles with his sexuality while in the past so does his grandfather. In Take Nothing With You our gay hero is coming to terms with his sexuality while his mother explores then represses hers.

Our story follows Eustace, a gay Londoner in his 50s, who has recently entered into an online relationship with a soldier posted overseas. Gale describes the online dating world with honesty and humour. The trials and, at times, absurdities, married with genuine emotional connection contained within a virtual relationship, are all convincingly portrayed. While Eustace is falling in love, he discovers he has cancer of the thyroid. And is given radioactive iodine therapy. This involves a short spell in a lead-lined hospital suite, where he listens to cello music recorded for him by his best friend, Naomi, with whom he played cello as a youngster. The sounds transport him out of that confined space, and time, back to his 1970s boyhood in Weston-Super-Mare.

Music school

We watch young Eustace as he falls for the cello and dedicates himself to it, dreaming of going to a special music school when he’s older. The characters he meets, especially his teacher, the exotic Carla Gold, become his biggest influences. His mother also falls under Carla’s spell, romantically, though Eustace is oblivious. Through Carla he also spends time with a gay couple she lives with, where his lessons take place. He observes gay life in the flesh, so to speak, as well as in the novels and soft porn magazines he has access to while there. When he sneaks some home and they’re found by his mother, things take a dark turn.

The coming-of-gay-age is handled kindly, with warmth, but Gale doesn’t shy away from the young man’s sexual explorations, which is important, especially given his wide readership. One of the joys of Gale’s writing is how even the smallest of characters can appear fully formed due, in part, to a charming wickedness alongside deeper observations. Mrs Duffy the organist, for example, has “an endearingly plain face, like a bulldog’s, and was evidently rather shy so he wondered if she’s taken up the organ as a way of hiding herself away”.

Burgeoning sexuality

Is it is not an exaggeration to say that Gale is one of Britain’s best-loved novelists and as with any work by a writer of his calibre, there is little to criticise. However, one or two things stretched credibility. In the present, we are told how Eustace had a lover who moved him into his home after knowing him two days and on the third day made a new will leaving Eustace his house, belongings and business. I was also struck that only the other gay characters notice Eustace’s burgeoning sexuality, none of his friends, family or peers at school notice or comment (never mind berate or bully him) until he is outed.

A real-life visit to Weston-Super-Mare was Gale’s inspiration for this novel. This, the gay theme, that the author plays the cello and his own father’s closeted sexuality, shows how Gale weaves his life experience with his fertile imagination. Perhaps this is what imbues his work with such heart and authenticity, and what makes Take Nothing With You , so readable, so believable, so . . . lovable. You’ll be carried along by the music of Gale’s prose, his charm, wit and warmth, and his empathy for us, for what it means to be human and other.

Irish Times

Patrick Gale’s experience as a child who found salvation and a sense of belonging in music deeply informs this, his 16th novel.

Growing up in Weston-super-Mare, sensitive Eustace has always felt out of place, until his mother signs him up for lessons with an inspirational cello teacher.

Soon, Eustace can think of little else —except his hopeful, fumbling relationship with his best friend, Vernon — and becomes good enough at the cello for his parents to send him on a summer residency at a highly exclusive music camp (but not good enough to gain a permanent place).

Told in flashbacks as Eustace, in late middle-age and facing a cancer diagnosis, looks back on a life that ended up not involving music at all, it proceeds with the partial, unresolved structure of memory itself. Some aspects of Eustace’s life, specifically the actions of his possibly bisexual mother, are never made fully clear.

Gale is excellent on the hot, messy nature of self-discovery and sexual awakening, but curiously not so good at writing about music. The extensive detailing of Eustace’s relationship with the cello is precisely where the novel refuses to sing.

Clare Allfree

I always look forward to Patrick Gale’s novels. This time around, my anticipation was increased when I heard that Take Nothing With You would explore the same territory as my latest book: the emotional impact music can make on a young gay man navigating the challenges of life. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a wonderful, intelligent and enriching novel.

It opens with the central character, Eustace, aged 50 and living in London. His soulmate died years ago and he’s single after being dumped by a subsequent partner who infected him with HIV. He now lives with a whippet called Joyce and plays cello in a mediocre amateur orchestra.

When he joins a dating app, he meets a much younger man, who is an army officer posted in the Middle East – but just before the pair are due to meet, Eustace is diagnosed with cancer and goes into hospital for treatment. There, he listens to some cello music which transports him back to his youth.

We then meet Eustace at the age of 10 in his home town of Weston-super-Mare, where he lives in an old people’s home with an aloof, difficult mother who is scarred by the loss of twin daughters, and a father whose relentless perkiness masks the pain of losing three brothers in the War. At school, Eustace is shy, bad at sports and feels like he doesn’t fit in. When he takes an interest in ballet, his father wants to stamp it out and encourages him to take up a musical instrument instead.

After seeing a cello recital, Eustace is intrigued. When glamorous soloist Carla Gold becomes his teacher, he is entranced. Once she introduces him to Ivan, his first cello, he’s hooked. “Ivan is your friend,” she tells him, “and first position is your home. When you’re not dancing with Ivan, you’ll feel bereft, and when you’re not in first position, you’ll be on an adventure.”

Carla opens the door to a bohemian world in which “the arts came before everything, including the obligation to be normal”. She encourages Eustace to play the cello in a way that sets his soul free, and music becomes his escape – an emotional support that helps him cope with bereavement, disappointment, sexual awakening, emotional discovery, tragedy and betrayal. It allows him to discover and then become the person he wants to be.

The plot of Take Nothing With You bounces between the two timeframes and is often surprising, with an unexpectedly dark plot twist towards the end. The narrative voice is wry and witty, and there are some lovely observations and period detail.

Standout scenes include an awkward sex education lesson in prep school and an audition for the music scholarship at a local public school, while the chapters that cover the first time Eustace leaves home to go to a Scottish summer programme are particularly strong.

Gale draws his protagonist with compassion and empathy, and the book is populated by some terrific supporting characters, such as former star cellist Naomi, who had to give up performing because of stage fright and becomes a surrogate sibling in Eustace’s life.

Ultimately, it is a forceful reminder of the emotional power of music. As Eustace is told by his teacher at summer school: “Music knits. It heals. It is balm to the soul.” The same could be said for this book.

When the main character in Patrick Gale’s new novel is being briefed about the once-off post-operative treatment he’ll undergo for thyroid cancer, he is told to bring nothing with him that he doesn’t mind leaving behind. The treatment will make him radioactive for a day, contaminating anything and anyone he touches, and the nurse’s instruction – the basis of the book’s title – sets the mood for Gale’s bittersweet story.

In fact, Eustace takes his life with him to the lead-lined room where he is to spend a day in isolation. And as soon as he begins to listen to a series of cello recordings – a Proustian gift from a friend – he is transported back to his 1970s childhood in the English seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, into memories of music and messy love.

Though less well known than some of his contemporaries, Gale is a prolific writer and has been working steadily since his two first novels were published simultaneously in 1986. His first venture into historical fiction, A Place Called Winter, was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award in 2015, and in 2017, his TV drama Man in an Orange Shirt was screened as part of the BBC’s Queer Britannia series. By the end of this year, his back catalogue, including some previously out-of-print titles, will be available from Tinder Press.

It’s good news, because Gale is an enticing and quietly subversive storyteller. On one level, Take Nothing With You is an accessible and fairly straightforward coming-of-age saga, exploring the development of Eustace’s relationship with music and his own sexuality, but its depictions of strangeness and toxicity of under-the-surface conventions of middle-class life take it into darker and more surprising territory.

An only child, an outsider and introvert, Eustace lives in the nursing home run by his parents. When, as a young teenager, he begins cello lessons with Carla, he discovers an intense passion for the instrument and new possibilities beckon. He and his mother are besotted with his sophisticated, extroverted teacher, and, through her, meet a gay couple that, in Eustace’s eyes, become a kind of alternative family. Gale uses dramatic irony to reveal that Carla and Eustace’s mother are having a sexual relationship. Eustace remains (slightly unbelievably) oblivious to this.

It’s a novel of doubles, a double narrative set in the present and the past, though the past has more emotional weight. There are two cello teachers, two love interests for the teenage Eustace, two trips to music camp, two nursing homes, two grandparents – one maternal, one paternal – two gay relationships.

Understated and eerie, this wonky mirroring captures the inevitability and impossibility of recurrence – the same things happen again but always differently – and, in a story mapping the transition from childhood to adulthood, its symbolic resonance is deeply satisfying.

Less satisfying are some of the plot twists, particularly an overly dramatic one involving Eustace’s thoroughly awful mother. Gale doesn’t always account for the motivations of his characters; ultimately, Eustace’s mother remains a mystery. He eschews neatness in more understandable ways, too – characters drift apart or change, they reject and betray one another. Again and again, Eustace’s ambitions are thwarted, fitting with one of the novel’s central themes: understanding and transcending regret.

In elegant, restrained prose, Gale writes with an eye on impermanence, showing how loss can be tinged with hope, and new beginnings with the threat of mortality. He is excellent at capturing time and place and while he doesn’t avoid social commentary – Eustace is alive to the nuances of the British class system, and his mother’s internalised homophobia has drastic consequences – he embeds it within the narrative so that it doesn’t feel superimposed.

Similarly, he writes about the cello and classical music with an insider’s knowledge but limits the passages of pure description; instead, he taps into a range of experiences and emotions that are both specific and beautifully universal.

The Irish Independent

I’m not one for long winded reviews so, without giving too much of the plot away, Take Nothing With You opens windows into the past and present lives of the book’s central character Eustace, from the ozone scented postcard feel of 1970s Weston-Super-Mare and the bohemian charm of Bristol’s Clifton enclave, up to present day London and online dating disasters. Isolated in a radiation chamber awaiting a dose of radiotherapy, the adult Eustace, armed with nothing more than an Mp3 of his best friend Naomi’s cello recitals for company, takes a long, reflective gaze back to a series of events from his childhood that helped shape who he is today. Drab upbringing in an OAP residential home in Weston, enigmatic cello lessons in Clifton, parental disharmony and betrayal, burgeoning sexual awareness and experimentation, educational disappointments and life changing visits to residential courses in the Scottish borders are all part of the jigsaw of Eustace’s unconventional childhood.

The author’s love of classical music, particularly the cello (he’s a keen player himself) features heavily, and while I’m not exactly ‘a classical music nut’ myself, I found that it didn’t put me off one bit. On the contrary, I was drawn in by the author’s descriptive use of language to help the reader understand how, for example, things such as posture, the mood of the player or the type of strings or bows used can affect the sound and shape of the notes produced….so much so that at times I had to remember to keep breathing and relax my shoulders, especially when Eustace was attempting to play some of the more technically challenging pieces. It was almost as if the cello became the main character!

Anyway – simply put, if you’re a fan of Patrick Gale then you won’t be disappointed by Take Nothing With You…..and if you haven’t already read anything by him (why the hell not?) this is as good a starting point as any. Enjoy.

Peter Hughes on Goodreads

This is Eustace’s story of survival in a world that seems to have so many barriers for him. There are some incredibly sad and emotional parts, but there’s a wonderful wit and humour within the writing that keeps the story from becoming too dark and too anguished.

I can’t say any more. I don’t really have the words to express just how much I loved this book. It’s not fast-paced or action filled, with twists and turns. It is however, so tender, so insightful and full of love. The power of love; the power of music and the power of kind and influential adults upon a young boy.

Intelligent, warm, cleverly structured. A novel to cherish and to shout about. Fabulous, just fabulous.

Ann Cater on Goodreads

This book has to be my most anticipated read of 2018 and I was over the moon when I received an early copy. It most definitely did not disappoint. But then, I am never disappointed with a Patrick Gale novel. (I am still beside myself that part of my review for the wonderful A Place Called Winter is quoted on his website!)

Take Nothing With You is the story of Eustace. On the face of it, it’s a coming of age tale, something which has been done so many times before but feels fresh and new with Patrick Gale’s compelling and elegant writing. Throughout the book, Eustace is learning what’s important in life, who he is, what matters. Passion permeates the book. A quiet passion for music and indeed for life. There are also chapters from an older Eustace’s point of view. This is a Eustace facing his own mortality, looking back at what and who he has loved.

Eustace has an inspirational music teacher in Carla Gold and later her own mentor Jean Curwen. Who would think that chapters about learning to play and buying a cello could be so enthralling? Yet in Patrick Gale’s masterful hands, they are just that. His own passion for music is clear and conveyed so beautifully through Eustace.

The lesser characters in the book are no less significant. Carla’s friends and flatmates Louis and Ebrahim who show Eustace there is nothing out of the ordinary in a loving gay relationship, his friend Vernon, who was not afraid to be that bit individual and looked after his ailing father with quiet dignity, even Eustace’s mother who wasn’t particularly likeable. All in some way served to show the complexities and variety of adult relationships.

Take Nothing With You is a wonderful read. It’s powerful, touching and thought-provoking and fully deserves a five star rating. In fact, it’s deserving of more than five. I can’t wait for the Edinburgh Book Festival event next month to hear the author talk about this book. Eustace and his cello have stolen my heart.

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Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale

Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale

I have been so very lucky to have read many great books ahead of publication a number spring to mind and now joining this list is Take Nothing With You (Tinder Press) by Patrick Gale. Why oh why is this the first book by Patrick Gale that I have read. I know that many are going to fall headlong into Patrick’s latest on publication. It is just beautiful in every sense of the word.

Because I am writing this sometime ahead of publication I do not want to give too much away. The story is about Eustace who has fallen in love again but now he is suffering from Cancer. Life is a little complicated for Eustace the man he has fallen for is not aware of how he feels.

For now, his very best friend Naomi is his closest friend and he chooses to let Naomi in on his feelings. At this time of his life and successful in his career, he is starting radiotherapy treatment and it is his Cello music that he is listening to put together by Naomi that suddenly takes Eustace on a journey back through his life to the 1970’s and Weston-Super-Mare and when as a young boy Eustace was signed up for music lessons. Eustace is struggling to find himself and he starts to learn the Clarinet but as time passes he knows this is not for him. But then he discovers the Cello and his world is changed. The overwhelming power of music. He is at one with his Cello as this becomes his escape from the problems within his family which is at best difficult. It is around this time that Eustace is now discovering his true self and his own inner feelings regarding his sexuality. At this time Naomi arrives in his life and their friendship is destined for a lifelong friendship. The trust that builds between the two is heartfelt. Patrick’s writing of Eustace’s life is so beautifully handled and told. The characters are rich and many. Each add to the story in their own way from the music teacher to school to his home life and friends. Eustace will come up against many barriers and at times this is extremely sad, but through the book there are many laughs to be found.

If I say anymore I will be giving the story away. All I will say is that I love this book so much it practically hurts. The story moves at a constant pace so that the reader will cherish every word. It is beautiful, tender and moving. If you have read any of Patrick Gale’s previous novels you are going to love Take Nothing With You .

Thank you to Go Georgina Moore for the review copy of Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale

Take Nothing With You was published by Tinder Press and will be published on 21 st August 2018 and is available to pre-order Waterstones, Amazon and also through your local independent bookshop.

Patrick Gale is on tour from July through to November with Take Nothing With You.

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Take Nothing With You: A richly absorbing novel of boyhood, coming of age, confusion and desire

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Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale

Reviewed by Tom Davies

In an attempt to rebound from his previous relationship, Eustace meets the calm and confident Theo on a dating app. Twenty years his junior, Theo is stationed on a military base, and their romance is confined to Skype calls. As they plan for Theo’s visit to London, Eustace, somewhere in his fifties, is diagnosed with cancer, and as part of his treatment must sit in a lead-lined room with nothing but a cheap MP3 player and a paperback book.

As he stares at his house just on the other side of the hospital window, Eustace takes us back through his childhood. He grew up a quiet, introspective child whose artistic pursuits never satisfied his parents until he found the cello. Under the guidance of the professional cellist, Carla Gold, Eustace’s life has meaning. But trying to make friends while his dad rents out their spare bedrooms as an old person’s home has always been difficult, and he’s never been very good at school, so through his relationship with the cello and the music he creates with it, he is able to put his life, all his achievements and his shortcomings, into perspective.

While at times the technical aspects of the music felt unnecessarily detailed, and led to the impression this was more memoir than fiction, Gale’s beautiful prose more than makes up for it. His cast of characters, also, have been drawn with such sympathy and vividness it is impossible to not feel for every one of them as they grow. By the end, I felt like I’d known them forever.

Take Nothing With You is a heartwarming tale of self discovery that will appeal to readers of Ian McEwan, and paves the way for a republication of Gale’s previous works, all with beautiful, matching covers.

Tom Davies works as a bookseller at Readings Doncaster.

Take Nothing With You

Patrick Gale

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Book reviews and other bookish things

Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale

This week saw the publication of Patrick Gale’s latest novel, Take Nothing With You . I had previously enjoyed his Costa shortlisted novel, A Place Called Winter , so was excited to have the opportunity to read a review copy of his latest work, which tells the story of a man and the childhood he leaves behind.

We first meet Eustace as a man in his fifties who is experiencing two very conflicting emotions. We learn that Eustace is seriously ill, and about to undergo radiotherapy treatment. But as well as contemplating his health and mortality, he has also fallen in love for the third time. His relationship with Theo is a modern one, having met him online and yet to see him in person, and he agonises over whether to share his diagnosis. By his side is his friend Naomi, who offers him support and an mp3 player containing cello music. This is one of the few items he takes with him into the lead-lined treatment room, with its message to ‘bring nothing with you that you wouldn’t mind leaving behind’ the first instance in which the titles relevance becomes clear. And as he settles for his treatment, he listens to the music which awakens memories from childhood, and it is from this point that we see Eustace grow up, and see the significance of music throughout his life.

The reader is taken back to Eustace’s childhood in Weston Super Mare, where we see a boy who is finding his feet, and discovering more about himself. His mother suggests that he take up music lessons, and after initially playing the clarinet circumstances lead him to switch to cello, which becomes a major part of his life. His lessons help him through the challenges that life brings, particularly those concerning family relationships with his parents marriage far from idyllic. In addition to his music, Eustace also discovers his sexuality, and this makes up a key part of his journey. This is a beautifully written coming of age tale which explores life in all its complexity, and emphasises the power of music. There were lots of details regarding the classical music elements and the author’s experience can clearly be seen here and this gives the story and the characters authenticity, so readers with a particular interest in this style of music will probably take even more from this than I did. Eustace’s journey made for an engrossing read which explores the transition from childhood into adulthood, a story which is filled with emotion, insight and honesty.

Fans of Patrick Gale’s writing will no doubt enjoy Take Nothing With You which is a moving story of love and music told with heart. It was published on 21 st August 2018 by Tinder Press, with thanks to Georgina Moore for providing a proof copy for review.

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2 thoughts on “ Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale ”

I loved this book – one of my favourites so far this year! I was lucky enough to go to his event at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Monday and got to meet him beforehand. Total fangirl moment!

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Take Nothing With You

By Patrick Gale (author)

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Take Nothing With You Synopsis

'Absolutely one of his best - a wonderful, wonderful read' Stephen Fry 'Funny and heartfelt' S pectator From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes a compassionate, compelling new novel of boyhood, coming of age , and the confusions of desire and reality . 'An incredibly beautiful story told with compassion. Nothing is wasted. Each sentence is beautifully crafted' Joanna Cannon 1970s Weston-Super-Mare and ten-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice. Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives. 'It's delicious, it's dear, it's heart-breaking and very funny' Rachel Joyce 'Suffused with the joy and wisdom of Gale's mid-life reconnection with music' Guardian ' Gale is excellent on the hot, messy nature of self-discovery and sexual awakening' Daily Mail 'Generously optimistic. It shows how our past shapes us, but suggests that we can make something from the emotional burdens that we bear' Telegraph What readers love about TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU: 'This is a beautifully written novel, simple to read but so humane and warm' ? ? ? ? ? 'As with all his books you feel you are reading about someone you know intimately such is his amazing characterisation. Read this book and feel totally fulfilled' ? ? ? ? ? 'This is a warming tale of a younger and later an old man overcoming adversity through his innate goodness, humour and optimism' ? ? ? ? ? 'Gale is a wonderful writer. His description of the Schubert string quintet rehearsals perfectly described the slow movement. I'd been searching for that music for a few years. This story is brilliant on so many fronts' ? ? ? ? ? 'A very beautiful novel of love, friendship and the cello' ? ? ? ? ?

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Finalists for Science Book Prize Are Revealed

BY Michael Schaub • yesterday

The Royal Society has announced the finalists for its Trivedi Science Book Prize, the annual U.K. award that “celebrates the best popular science writing from across the globe.”

Cat Bohannon made the shortlist for Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution , which was also a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Kashmir Hill was named a finalist for Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy .

Tom Chivers was shortlisted for Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World , alongside Gísli Pálsson for The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction .

Also named finalists were Venki Ramakrishnan for Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality and Kelly and Zach Weinersmith for A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said in a statement, “Each of this year’s shortlisted books is a testament to both the wonders of science and the art of writing and bring these fascinating and varied areas of enquiry and discovery to curious readers everywhere.”

The Science Book Prize was established in 1988. Previous winners include Stephen Jay Gould for Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History , Bill Bryson for A Short History of Nearly Everything , and Caroline Criado Perez for Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men .

The winner of this year’s award will be announced on Oct. 24.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.

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Take Nothing With You: A richly absorbing novel of boyhood, coming of age, confusion and desire Hardcover – 21 Aug. 2018

From the bestselling author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER comes a compassionate, compelling new novel of boyhood, coming of age , and the confusions of desire and reality . 'It's delicious, it's dear, it's heart-breaking and very funny' Rachel Joyce 'An incredibly beautiful story told with compassion. Nothing is wasted. Each sentence is beautifully crafted' Joanna Cannon 1970s Weston-Super-Mare and ten-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice. Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Tinder Press
• Publication date 21 Aug. 2018
• Dimensions 16 x 3.2 x 23.9 cm
• ISBN-10 1472205332
• ISBN-13 978-1472205339
• See all details

Product description

Book description, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tinder Press (21 Aug. 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1472205332
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1472205339
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16 x 3.2 x 23.9 cm
• 39,600 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• 45,296 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Patrick gale.

Patrick Gale is a keen cellist, gardener and artistic director of the North Cornwall Book Festival. He lives with his husband, the farmer and sculptor, Aidan Hicks (www.aidanhicks.com), on their farm at the far west of Cornwall. In addition to his latest, Mother’s Boy, which is published on March 1 2022, his seventeen novels include Take Nothing With You (2018), which was his fourth Sunday Times bestseller, Rough Music (2000), Notes From an Exhibition (2007), A Perfectly Good Man (2012) and A Place Called Winter (2015). In 2017 his two part drama Man in an Orange Shirt was screened by BBC2 as part of the Gay Britannia season. Continuing to be broadcast regularly around the world, this won the International Emmy for best miniseries and is now in development as a musical. He is currently working on a television adaptation of A Place Called Winter and a stage version of Take Nothing With You. Extracts from the BBC documentary All Families Have Secrets – the Narrative Art of Patrick Gale can be seen on his website www.galewarning.org.

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Customers say

Customers find the visual design beautiful and insightful, capturing the city and Weston convincingly. They also find the content touching and thought-provoking. Readers describe the writing style as lovely and sensitive. They describe the reading experience as fabulous, with great characters and an engrossing story. Customers also find it a joy and privilege to read. Opinions are mixed on the level of detail, with some finding it enlightening and delightful, while others find it too much.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book a fabulous read with sensitive and beautiful writing. They also say it's a great achievement from the pen of Patrick Gale, and that no word is wasted.

"...A throughly good read, definitely recommended ." Read more

"This is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in ages. I hadn’t read anything by this author prior to this being picked as our book club choice...." Read more

" A great read . You don’t need to be a cellist or classical music lover to enjoy this book (although sometimes the emphasis on both is a bit dense)...." Read more

"...Simple answer is NO. Quite simply a totally absorbing read ...." Read more

Customers find the storyline engrossing, well written, and good idea for a novel. They also mention that the book churns up early year memories.

"...n’t developed enough, as I was expecting more but the journey through adolescence is well told " Read more

"What a beautifully told story of a sensitive young boy who finds meaning and beauty in his life through learning the cello!..." Read more

"Maybe I’m just not the target demographic. But the absence of plot would be my main issue...." Read more

"...way he and the characters around him develop throughout the novel is a joy to behold . One of the best books I've read for some time." Read more

Customers find the writing style lovely.

"This is a beautifully written novel , simple to read but so humane and warm...." Read more

"...Patrick Gale is one of our most gifted writers and is becoming a national treasure. Read this book and feel totally fulfilled." Read more

"...for characterisation, beautiful prose and a story that tugs at the heart while at the same time there are..." Read more

"...environment for a youngster! The book is beautifully written and insightful with more than a few laugh out loud bits!" Read more

Customers find the book touching, thought-provoking, and tugging at the heart. They also say it reflects both the aspirations and disappointments of growing up. Readers also describe the book as brave, clever, and funny.

"... Thought provoking and memorable." Read more

"Not a completely uncomplicated life is described in an honest and insightful way ...." Read more

"...for characterisation, beautiful prose and a story that tugs at the heart while at the same time there are some very funny moments..." Read more

Customers find the characters in the book great, humane, and warm.

"This is a beautifully written novel, simple to read but so humane and warm...." Read more

"...I thought the characters were very well presented and I had no problem remembering who fitted where or where the timelines were drawn...." Read more

"...you are reading about someone you know intimately such is his amazing characterisation ...." Read more

"...It is very funny and full of great characters . It reflects very well both the aspirations and the disappointments of growing up. Great book." Read more

Customers find the book entertaining, thought-provoking, memorable, tender, moving, and uplifting. They also describe it as passionate, clever, funny, and celebration of life.

"...Funny very often, but also tender and moving, and in the end uplifting , as Eustace emerges, in spite of the horrors experienced at the ironically..." Read more

"...Read this book and feel totally fulfilled ." Read more

"...It perfectly captivates the feelings of being a young person with all the hang-ups and dilemmas. It is very funny and full of great characters...." Read more

"...A joy and privilege to read ." Read more

Customers find the visual design beautiful, realistic, and awesomely evocative of small town 1970s. They also say the book captures the city and Weston convincingly at that time.

"...The majority of the characters were very likeable, and very realistic ...." Read more

"...He is at his best here and it is very beautiful !" Read more

"...The rich perfection of detail and the warmth, ingenuity and honesty with which the story is told makes this outstanding book hard to put down...." Read more

"... It's beautiful , and stays with you - what a nice chap he must be!" Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the level of detail in the book. Some find the musical details a delight, while others say there is too much detail and not enough story.

"...For me the musical details were a delight , and I rushed to Youtube to remind myself of the Schubert Quintet played at the summer school, which is..." Read more

"Not sure about this book. For me too much detail and not enough story. It won’t stop me from reading Patrick Gale again though!" Read more

"...But the absence of plot would be my main issue. I was fine with the cello details , though could have used a little less graphic detail of youthful..." Read more

"A beautiful, gripping musical and hormonal journey through the life of Eustace and his cello...." Read more

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It Ends with Us

Adapted from the Colleen Hoover novel, Lily overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life. A chance meeting with a neurosurgeon sparks a connection but Lily begins to see sides of ... Read all Adapted from the Colleen Hoover novel, Lily overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life. A chance meeting with a neurosurgeon sparks a connection but Lily begins to see sides of him that remind her of her parents' relationship. Adapted from the Colleen Hoover novel, Lily overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life. A chance meeting with a neurosurgeon sparks a connection but Lily begins to see sides of him that remind her of her parents' relationship.

• Justin Baldoni
• Christy Hall
• Colleen Hoover
• Blake Lively
• Jenny Slate
• 93 User reviews
• 67 Critic reviews
• 54 Metascore

Top cast 24

• Ryle Kincaid

• Atlas Corrigan

• Andrew Bloom

• Jenny Bloom

• Young Atlas Corrigan

• Young Lily Bloom

• Doctor Johnson

• Doctor Julie

• Doctor Dunbar

• (as Megan Elyse Robinson)

• Female Waiter
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

The Big List of Summer Movies

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Did you know

• Trivia The casting of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni as Lily and Ryle caused backlash from fans because in the book Lily is 23 and Ryle is 30, while Lively is 35 and Baldoni is 39. Author of the book Colleen Hoover explained in an interview that she wanted to age the characters up in the movie in an effort to correct a mistake she made in the book. She said, "Back when I wrote It Ends With Us, the new adult [genre] was very popular. You were writing college-age characters. That's what I was contracted to do. I made Lily very young. I didn't know that neurosurgeons went to school for 50 years. There's not a 20-something neurosurgeon. As I started making this movie, I'm like, 'We need to age them out, because I messed up.' So, that's my fault."
• Connections Featured in The Project: Episode dated 6 August 2024 (2024)
• Soundtracks Strangers Performed by Ethel Cain

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes

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Japan Warns of Elevated Risk of Giant Earthquake After Strong One Hits

The official warning came after a 7.1-magnitude temblor struck off the coast of southern Japan on Thursday.

Strong Earthquake Hits Southern Japan

Shake intensity.

By River Akira Davis Kiuko Notoya Hisako Ueno and Victoria Kim

River Akira Davis, Kiuko Notoya and Hisako Ueno reported from Tokyo, and Victoria Kim from Seoul.

Japan’s meteorological agency said on Thursday that there was a higher-than-usual chance that an immense earthquake could hit the country in the next few days, following a 7.1-magnitude temblor off the southern island of Kyushu.

Japan has long expected a major earthquake to occur along the Nankai Trough off its eastern coast. As of last year, researchers said there was a 60 percent chance that an earthquake of magnitude 8 to 9 — even more devastating than the one in 2011 that laid waste to the country’s northeast coast and knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant — would occur in the trough area over the next 20 years.

After the 7.1-magnitude quake on Thursday, Japan’s meteorological agency convened a group of experts to evaluate whether it could be related to the long-anticipated bigger disaster, called a “Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake.”

Experts warn that an earthquake between two tectonic plates that converge along the Nankai megathrust fault, which runs from Kyushu north through Tokyo, could cause devastation. It could extensively damage cities throughout Japan, potentially cause a tsunami and lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“The possibility of a large-scale earthquake occurring in the area of ​​the Nankai Trough is relatively higher than usual,” the meteorological agency said in a statement late Thursday.

The risk that an earthquake of magnitude of 8 or higher would occur after one with a magnitude of 7 is particularly elevated for about a week after the initial temblor, the agency said.

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