A Place Called Winter, by Patrick Gale

I stumbled on this book by way of its sharing the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Prize shortlist with Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek.  This is not a prize that’s normally on my radar, but I was interested to see that the shortlist included other novels I’d read:

• Sweet Caress by William Boyd (Bloomsbury) (abandoned)
• A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press)
• Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea (Scribe UK) (see my review)
• End Games in Bordeaux by Allan Massie (Quartet) (I want this, but haven’t sourced it yet.)
• Tightrope by Simon Mawer (Little,Brown) (see my review)
• Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar (Picador Australia) (see my review)

The wonderful Kingston library came up trumps with the Boyd and the Gale, and they seemed like ideal books to complement my reading of Xavier Herbert’s  Poor Fellow My Country, a book so heavy (literally) and so dense with…