Agree, Waterbird. I find Patrick Gale very hit-and-miss -- qualities that I like in one novel will be entirely absent from another, as if they were written by different people, even if they're close together in time.
The two I like enough to reread are Notes from an Exhibition and The Cat Sanctuary -- OP, you should read PG's The Cat Sanctuary if you liked NFaE. Similar Cornish setting, complex family dynamic, a novelist rather than an artist as one of the central characters, broadly redemptive and cheerful.
I would also recommend Jane Stevenson's two collections of novellas, Several Deceptions and Good Women -- she deserves to be much better known, and is a sharp, funny, clever, humane writer. Even if you don't normally read anything shorter than a full-length novel, these are wonderful.
Maybe Tessa Hadley London Train and The Past, in particular or almost anything be Helen Dunmore.