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Book Reviewed by:
Davida Chazan
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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.
Paperback Original
BETHEL
A violent and excited patient is forcibly taken by his legs and plunged head foremost into an ordinary swimming bath. He is not permitted the use of his limbs when in the water, but is detained there, or taken out and plunged again in the bath, until the required effect of tranquility is produced.
L. Forbes Winslow, Turkish Bath in Mental Disorders (1896)
Chapter One
The attendants came for him as a pair, as always. Some of them were kind and meant well. Some were frightened and, like first-timers at a steer branding, hid their fear in swearing and brutality. But this pair was of the most unsettling kind, the sort that ignored him. They were talking to one another as they came for him and continued to talk to one another as they fastened the muff on his wrists and led him along the corridor to the treatment room.
He was the first in that day, so the echoing room, where even ordinary speech was magnified to a shout, was quiet except for the sound of filling baths. There ...
How much of this story is true to the real one of Harry Cane's life is irrelevant. Certainly, the amount of information Gale received from his grandmother must have had many gaps where he had to fill in and add details. Gale clearly overcame all of these obstacles, and in doing so, gave us something marvelously well rounded, fascinating throughout, and obviously, a loving tribute to a man he never had the chance to know. This makes me think that Harry would have been very pleased to see his very successful great-grandson live as an openly proud, gay man...continued
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(Reviewed by Davida Chazan).
Amanda Craig
Absorbing, moving and beautifully written, with echoes of E.M. Forster which I found especially enjoyable. Jojo Moyes
Patrick Gale has written a book which manages to be both tender and epic, and carries the unmistakeable tang of a true story. I loved it. Louisa Young
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 which keeps you shaking your head and biting your lip in concern and shame and disbelief. Patricia Duncker
Bold, moving, intensely erotic - I couldn't put down this tale of passion and endurance, told with such tenderness.
In Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter, he describes how Harry Cane comes across an office for Canadian emigration, and decides that moving abroad to become a homesteader/farmer in Canada is the solution to keeping the scandal of his being homosexual away from his family. Most people know something about the American push to settle the west. Over the years, numerous well known works of fiction (for example, Laura Engels Wilder's Little House on the Prairie novels, Edna Ferber's Cimarron and Dana Fuller Ross' Wagons West series), as well as hundreds of Hollywood movies and television series have been placed during this period of American history. However, both in fiction and in film, the world has mostly ignored the settling of western ...
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