Dangerous Pleasures

Eleven electric stories of lost women, gay men, curious children, and nostalgic adults from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition.

A woman tries on a wig and it unlocks a side of herself she never knew existed. Visiting his old boarding school, a man is nearly undone by memories of a romantic encounter with a former classmate. When she introduces her girlfriend to her family, a young woman is shocked by her mother’s all-too-welcoming reaction. These are the stories of Patrick Gale: loving and warm, familiar and surprising, and all crafted with the precise wit that has made him one of Britain’s most beloved authors of short fiction.

The eleven stories that make up Dangerous Pleasures reveal the hidden joys and buried agonies that lie behind our friends’ and neighbors’ happy smiles. Gale understands that the moments that can alter our lives forever come quietly, unexpectedly—as soft and innocuous as a platinum-blond wig.

The Sunday Times calls Gale’s short fiction “nattily subversive, sexually ambiguous, intelligent and disturbing.” More than anything, his prose displays an unerring sense of humanity, in every brilliant story, and every perfect line.