Gale's narration is good but not so much of a range and somewhat variable. But this is a story about discovering love, surviving and transcending abuse, emotional and physical. We had just finished reading 'Little House' to our youngest. I loved the secondary story of the settling of the Canadian wheat basket and the hard lives of the homesteaders. Oh, and what bitter memories he has to bite – banished from home and family in England he lands on a Section on the Canadian plains working through every waking hour to fulfill the terms of the Grant fence and cultivate 160 acres within 3 years. Says Harry when, late in the book, a Cree two-spirit healer (maybe) has him chew roots hoping to trigger a healing vision. 'It WAS bitter like biting into memory itself' It is a novel of secrets, sexuality, and, ultimately, great love. 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 colonized Canadian prairies.

A privileged elder son and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step.

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale