Welcome to the new Readings website! We're excited to bring some of our in-shop magic to our online space.

Take Nothing With You
Paperback

Take Nothing With You

$22.99
Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to your wishlist.

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.

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.

Read More
In Shop
Out of stock
Shipping & Delivery

$9.00 standard shipping within Australia
FREE standard shipping within Australia for orders over $100.00
Express & International shipping calculated at checkout

MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Headline Publishing Group
Country
United Kingdom
Date
4 April 2019
Pages
368
ISBN
9781472205353

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.

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.

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Headline Publishing Group
Country
United Kingdom
Date
4 April 2019
Pages
368
ISBN
9781472205353
 
Book Review

Take Nothing With You
by Patrick Gale

by Tom Davies, Aug 2018

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.