His namesake company, among the largest agricultural interests in California, was established in Corcoran in 1921 and remains the town’s most influential employer. Boswell as the city’s real founding father. Like many towns in the San Joaquin Valley, its founder was a real estate developer with dreams of making it rich. Corcoran is situated at the edge of what was once a giant lake - that is, until farms diverted the water from the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Ĭorcoran was incorporated in 1914. The threat of flooding is one the region has faced for decades. (A thick layer of clay underlies the Tulare Lake region, preventing floodwaters from percolating into aquifers.) He is an intensely sympathetic character in. A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale 4.11 avg. Harry’s anxieties about his sexuality is made more poignant by the reader’s ability to look back from more enlightened times. Local officials worry that it will be unable to withstand the pressure of water sloshing against it for up to two years, which is how long it may take for Tulare Lake to recede. A Place Called Winter does not offer resolution, but it does offer hope that emotional truth and loyalty to that truth may be a way forward for Harry. A Place Called Winter is a beautifully written and tender novel about one man’s journey to find himself, loosely based on the life of the author’s maternal grandfather. His first truly historical novel, it begins in Edwardi Paul Burston - Author of 'The Closer I Get' My last post about EM Forster and Maurice got me thinking about another much-loved, more recent read. It is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.Adding to the uncertainty are questions about the integrity of the levee itself. Published in 2015 and shortlisted for the Costa Award, A Place Called Winter is Patrick Gale’s queerest novel in years. 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. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. 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. A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. To find yourself, sometimes you must lose everything.

A place called winter