He grew up with stories of his mother’s “Cowboy Grandpa” out in Canada, who his brothers variously told him lived in a log cabin, killed and skinned bears with his bare hands, fought with Indians and so on. That’s the blurb from the back of the novel’s first edition, but what was the story behind the story? A Place Called Winter grew out of a family mystery which had long puzzled Patrick.

It is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.Ī key page from the unfinished memoir by Phyllis Betty Ennion – Patrick’s grandmother – which was one of the novel’s inspirations. In this exquisite journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. 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. 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. 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.įorced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies.

A Place Called Winter was a Radio 2 Book Club Choice on publication and went on to be shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the 2016 Independent Booksellers Book of the Year award.Ī privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step.

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale