Place Called Winter, A (Costa Shortlis'15)

If you've never read a Patrick Gale, stop now and pick up the Sunday Times Top Ten hardback and paperback bestseller, A PLACE CALLED WINTER - picked for the BBC Radio 2 Simon Mayo Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club.

To find yourself, sometimes you must lose everything.

A shy but privileged elder son, 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 force him to abandon his wife and child and sign up for emigration to Canada.

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 and madness that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before.