Patrick Gale is the best-selling author of Notes From an Exhibition. He’s visiting Australia at the invitation of the Brisbane Writers Festival to talk about his highly acclaimed new novel A Perfectly Good Man. Patrick was born on the Isle of Wight, where his father was prison governor at Camp Hill, as his grandfather had been at nearby Parkhurst. Later the family moved to London, where his father ran Wandsworth Prison. In the meantime he was sent to various boarding schools.

He says of himself that he has never had a grown-up job. While working on his first novels he eked out his slender income with odd jobs; as a typist, a singing waiter, a designer’s secretary, a ghost-writer for an encyclopedia of things musical and, increasingly, as a book reviewer. In 1987 he moved to Camelford near the north coast of Cornwall and began a love affair with the county that has fed his work ever since.

It's the location for this new novel. The 'Perfectly Good Man' of the title is in fact a priest and not good at all, or no more than anyone else, although perhaps it's his knowledge of his limitations that makes him so interesting. The novel tells not just his story but the stories of all those around him, weaving backwards and forwards in time, allowing Gale to give us pieces of the puzzle one at a time. It's only when we see the whole thing that the full richness is revealed. Gale is easy to read, but don't let that fool you, he's also wonderfully insightful. This is an excellent novel.

Patrick Gale now lives in the far west of Cornwall, on a farm near Lands End, with his husband, Aidan Hicks, where they raise beef cattle and grow barley.

He will be in conversation with Steven Lang.