A Place Called Winter
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Authors: Patrick Gale
Copyright © 2015 Patrick Gale
The right of Patrick Gale to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook in 2015 by Tinder Press
An imprint of Headline Publishing Group
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 1 4722 0532 2
Cover photographs © Roberta Murray/Millennium Images (background), Zodie Hawkins/Trevillion Images (man)
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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About the Author
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester before going to Oxford University. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End. One of this country’s best-loved novelists, his most recent works are
A Perfectly Good Man
,
The Whole Day Through
and the Richard and Judy bestseller
Notes From An Exhibition
.
Praise for A Place Called Winter
‘Patrick Gale has written a book which manages to be both tender and epic . . . I loved it’ Jojo Moyes
‘Beautifully structured around the warmest of warm hearts, but it’s also run through with something new: a devastating chill of loss, fear and exile’ Louisa Young
‘A beautiful, sensitively told tale full of deep human truths and sadness, but hope too. He remains one of our very best storytellers’ Matt Haig
‘Patrick Gale has achieved a rare thing – a beautifully true novel that is as much about simple friendship as it is about love and passion. Even more rare, he has managed to tell a heartbreaking story without manipulating the reader. Enormously impressive’ Stella Duffy
‘One of the finest writers of his generation’ Barbara Gowdy
‘Its portrait of a gay man’s journey from the comfortable hypocrisies of pre-war England to the harsh purity of farming in Canada is absorbing, moving and beautifully written’ Amanda Craig
‘In this delicious novel of illicit love and bold reinvention Patrick Gale takes on a Great Northern American Adventure with all the fleet-footed grace of his much-loved British family sagas’ Armistead Maupin
‘Tender, heroic and heartbreaking. I savoured every beautifully constructed sentence, in a story rich in historical detail’ Hannah Beckerman
‘It’s a long time since I read a novel that made me care so deeply for the fates of the characters – their survival and happiness’ Patricia Duncker
‘Beautiful writing, gripping characters, and a final chapter that made me weep’
The Bookbag
‘An Edwardian
Brokeback
, utterly transporting and swoon-making’ Damian Barr
‘I thought it was an excellent novel – sensitive, humane and full of interest’ Andrew Miller
By Patrick Gale
The Aerodynamics of Pork
Kansas in August
Ease
Facing the Tank
Little Bits of Baby
The Cat Sanctuary
Caesar’s Wife
The Facts of Life
Dangerous Pleasures
Tree Surgery for Beginners
Rough Music
A Sweet Obscurity
Friendly Fire
Notes from an Exhibition
The Whole Day Through
Gentleman’s Relish
A Perfectly Good Man
A Place Called Winter
About the Book
To find yourself, sometimes you must love everything.
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.
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. It is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.
For Aidan Hicks
Acknowledgements
This novel would not have happened without the lively anecdotes, evocative photograph collection and half-filled exercise book of memoirs passed down by my late maternal grandmother, Phyllis Betty Ennion, the little girl Harry left behind. I apologise to her and her daughters for my outrageously fictitious filling-in of blanks, and to the shades of the real life Wellses and Canes, whose dignity this novel has traduced.
Winter is a real place, though now an atmospheric ghost town. I am pleased to say that the acres Harry first ploughed over a century ago are still under cultivation.
My heartfelt thanks to my editor, Imogen Taylor, and my agent, Caradoc King, for their invaluable support and expert judgement, and to my trusted readers, Penelope Hoare and Marina Endicott, for their keen honesty and shrewd suggestions.
Thanks to the late Paul Slaymaker and to Jørgen Troels Munk Levring for the use of their names – names loaned in support of the charities Diversity Role Models and The Kaleidoscope Trust respectively.
The research I conducted was partly funded by a grant from the Authors’ Foundation and greatly assisted by the hospitable generosity of fellow novelists Marina Endicott and Barbara Gowdy. Along the journey from East to West, I was much helped by Toronto Public Library and the library of Toronto University, Steven Maynard, Neil Richards, Alan Miller, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, North Battleford Library, and, unwittingly so, by Mary Luger, whose beautiful ranch near Hinton inspired the entirely fictitious Bethel.
A novel is no place for a scholarly bibliography, but these are just some of the books that inspired me and that might in turn interest this novel’s readers:
James Gardiner,
Who’s A Pretty Boy, Then? 150 Years of Gay Life in Pictures
Sean Brady,
Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861–1913
Matt Cook,
London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885–1914
Walter L. Williams,
The Spirit and the Flesh, Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture
Joel Braslow,
Mortal Ills and Bodily Cures
Lesley Erickson,
Westward Bound, Sex, Violence, the Law and the Making of a Settler Society
Adele Perry,
On the Edge of Empire, Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia 1849–1871
Jean Okimãsis,
Cree, Language of the Plains
Heather Robertson,
Salt of the Earth, the Story of the Homesteaders in Western Canada
Susan Jackel, ed.,
A Flannel Shirt and Liberty, British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West 1880–1914
