Patrick Gale & Andrew Miller

Patrick Gale’s Love Lane is set in 1950s Northern England. Three generations of men, two of women. When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane is brutally obliged to sell up and sail home to an England transformed by two world wars, his arrival triggers unwelcome self- examination for the family he abandoned, and for whom he has never been more than a distant myth. His daughter feels duty bound to take him in but is riven with doubt and ambushed by a long-buried anger she has never before expressed. Harry’s effect on the next generation is less predictable, and enables his granddaughter to deal with an unspeakable trauma, while her gentle husband feels seen for who he truly is. Can Harry stay and make a new life before it’s too late, or will he find himself cast out again, punished for having witnessed and understood too much? From the rural plains of Canada to 1950s Liverpool and Yorkshire, Love Lane is a searing portrayal of escape and entrapment, and a powerful exploration of what home and family can really be.   

December 1962, the West Country is the setting for The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller. In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He’s been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that’s already faltering. There is affection – if not always love – in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards – a true winter, the harshest in living memory – the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, could you run to?