The Novel Cure: Literary prescriptions for an inability to grow things

Ailment: Inability to grow things

Cure: A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

When someone gives you a potted plant, do you see the shrivelled, blackened thing it will become? Was a patch of cress on cotton wool the last thing you successfully grew? If so, you probably look on with incomprehension as your vegetable-growing friends disappear off to their allotments. Be inspired by Patrick Gale's entrée to historical fiction, A Place Called Winter. As it shows, even those with no previous horticultural know-how can find their inner farmer when pushed.

An educated gentleman of leisure with a dependent wife and child, Gale's hero Harry Cane is a man as far removed from the soil as you. Yet when his homosexual affair comes to light – in an era when such acts were deemed criminal – he flees to Canada, alone. There, after serving a year's apprentice as a farm labourer, he finds himself the master of 160 acres of wilderness.

In fact, Cane has always fantasised about living a more useful life and working for his keep. In Saskatchewan, in a place called Winter, he finds his chance. With a little help from the siblings on the farm next door, he turns his land into a going concern, producing wheat by the sackful.

Meanwhile, Troels Munck – a bullying but magnetic Dane who adopted him on the boat out – lurks like a bad odour, threatening the fragile idyll. War, bigotry and deadly illness intervene, too, but Cane dedicates himself to the land and makes it work, staying rooted long enough for love to find him again.

This is no farming manual. But the deep undercurrents of love and desire that give the novel its pull will awaken you to the fecund possibilities of the soil – or your window-box. Harry Cane embodies the spirit of self-sufficient pioneer in a gloriously non-clichéd way. Even you, left alone in the wilds to fend for yourself, might roll up your sleeves and discover a pair of green thumbs.

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