Edwardian gentleman Harry Cane is sitting in a Lyons Corner House, contemplating knocking back an overdose of laudanum to rid himself of a broken heart and the shame of social scandal. An ostensibly happily married man, he has been discovered in a homosexual affair with an actor who takes a rather more pragmatic view of matters (“I preferred you married and unobtainable. In fact that’s how I prefer all my men”). Suddenly, he spots a sign through the window calling for emigrants to Canada and is presented with a way out.
As Patrick Gale explains in an afterword, his own antecedent – his mother’s grandfather – was one of hundreds to take up “the extraordinary opportunity” of claiming 160 acres of Canadian prairie land in return for fencing and cultivating it. But although Gale drew on family letters and papers, his interest piqued by “a cloud of disapproval hanging over him, of that particularly fascinating kind where details are too distasteful to be put into words”, the life he imagines for Harry is primarily an invented one.
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