Olejar Books

A powerful and moving novel in which Patrick Gale casts a compassionate yet satirically sharp eye over the pains and abuses inflicted by families, friends and lovers.

Joanna, a Junoesque American photographer, shares a lovely, lonely retreat on Cornwall´s Bodmin Moor with her novelist lover, Judith. On an assignment to an African principality, she feels compelled to meet up with Judith´s estranged sister, Deborah, whose husband has just been murdered by a bomb meant for someone more important.

Impulsively, Joanna rescues Deborah from the respectable compassion of in-laws and brings her back to Cornwall to recuperate, unaware of the devils this will unleash in her womanly paradise.

As Judith struggles to unlock a new novel and Deborah struggles to keep locked-up the girlhood horrors neither of them has yet confronted, the three women are caught up in a battle that is no less bloody for being so domestic.

The Cat Sanctuary draws closely on the landscape of bleak moorland and rain-sodden valleys in which Patrick Gale was then living.