Expertly, Gale teases out the threads that bind these two men. With his random, prowling capacity for destruction, he will haunt Harry’s career as a homesteader. Above all Troels is a creature of superbly developed animal instinct, unvexed by any ideas of morality. In Troels, Gale has created an extraordinary character: brutal, sadistic yet clinging, with a gift for spotting the weaknesses of other men and making himself essential to them. Harry is pursued by a nightmarish figure called Troels Munck who takes charge of him on the voyage out, under the guise of showing a raw emigrant the ropes. The classic story of a man finding himself through labour on his own land is derailed almost as soon as it begins to take shape. But for Harry there is no chance of shedding the past. The farm work he undertakes, the building of his house, the fencing and breaking of the land, are all described in authoritative and engrossing detail. Gale’s confident, supple prose expresses the labour and hardship that toughen Harry’s body as they calm his mind. The prairies are a new world where men and women are transformed by a way of life that is harsh but offers a certain freedom and space to reinvent the self.

Harry’s panic and shame and the terse, self-righteous brutality with which he is ordered out of his own life reveal the mores of the time more effectively than any polemic. When their relationship is exposed by a blackmailer, Harry is told by his wife’s family to remove himself immediately from wife, child and country. They begin a sexual relationship, which on Harry’s side is a revelation of love and passion. In a period where homosexual acts, even in private, were punished both by the law and by social disgrace, Harry meets Mr Browning, an actor who offers voice coaching.

What changes his life utterly is the realisation that he loves men. He is apt to stammer and to stick in his rut, having been marked by the early death of his mother and constrained by everything that is expected of him. By the time Harry gets on the emigrant ship, Gale has established his character with precise, economical strokes. Nothing could seem more quixotic, at first sight, than that a married man living in England with a young child and a private income should decide to leave it all and sail to Canada for a life of hard physical work and uncertain chances. Among these settlers is Patrick Gale’s fictional Harry Cane, whose experience is loosely based on that of Gale’s own great-grandfather.

The town grew up around a station named after one of the contractors who built the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which drew European settlers to the Canadian prairies because, under the Dominion Lands Act, a quarter-section of land (160 acres) could be possessed without payment if a homesteader cultivated a quarter of it within three years. W inter, Saskatchewan, is a real place, first settled in 1908.

A place called winter