Patrick Gale (http://galewarning.org/about-patrick/) based himself in London after graduating from Oxford in 1983, starting out in a bedsit in Notting Hill. Though his website proudly reports that he “has never had a grown-up job”, Gale supported himself while writing his first novels – The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985), Ease (1985) and Kansas in August (1987) – by typing, ghost-writing, book-reviewing and, most winningly, working as a singing waiter. He moved to Cornwall in 1987, to Camelford, where he wrote his “mid-period” novels: Facing the Tank (1988), Little Bits of Baby (1989) and an all-woman novel, The Cat Sanctuary (1990). An epic family saga, The Facts of Life (1995), won Gale the attention of Armistead Maupin (whose biography he has also written). Rough Music (2000) saw Gale published to critical acclaim in the US. Six titles have followed up to the publication of A Place Called Winter.
This latest novel has a summary as follows. A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence – until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the golden suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before.
This is a journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, in which Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. It is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love. You could get really absorbed by this story.
Enquire at your local library or available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-Called-Winter-Patrick-Gale/dp/1472205294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427398837&sr=8-1&keywords=place+called+winter
352 pages in Tinder Press
First published 24 March 2015
ISBN 978-1472205292
Patrick Gale