Jane Urquhart

Klara holds Eamon O'Sullivan in thrall. Yet just as he wins this war of love his victory is lost to the Great War and Klara is left alone. But when an architect plans a memorial to the Canadian dead in France, Klara must use her skills to carve, to create and to remember.

The Stone Carvers

A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family’s complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.

Away

In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him—his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter—in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination—is Jane Urquhart's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.

The Underpainter

Sanctuary line

"Set mainly in a remote area of County Kerry in the '40s and '50s, Jane Urquhart's stunning new novel is at once intimate and epic in scope. Tam, an English woman in her thirties, has been living in this harshly beautiful region since shortly after the war, in which she served as an auxiliary pilot. She is now leaving her lover, Niall, who, like his father before him, is a meteorologist. The airliner she is travelling on becomes grounded by fog at Gander Airport, Newfoundland. As she waits, she regards an enigmatic mural, and revisits not only the circumstances that brought her to Ireland but her intense relationship with Niall and his growing despondency over his younger brother Kieran's disappearance years before. We learn of Kieran's troubled childhood and the tragedy that caused him as a boy to be separated from home and taken in by a widowed countrywoman who lives in the mountains behind the town. He comes to know the local people, among them a tailor, a fisherman-teacher, and a sheep farmer who is a great philosopher. There is also the jeweller's daughter, a young woman who will come to change the course of several lives. Running parallel is the story of Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead and how he created the mural that is Tam's only companion through three long days and nights. An elegiac novel of emotional depth that vividly evokes a time and a place, The Night Stages explores the meaning of separation, the sorrows of fractured families, and the profound effect of home in a world where a way of life is changing. It is Jane Urquhart's richest, most rewarding novel to date."--

The night stages

Brian Quirt

It's summer 1889, a season of reckless stunts and river casualities in Niagara Falls. Four lives become entangled by the whirlpool at the Falls and the woods surrounding it. Darker and more sinister currents gain momentum and ultimately release them from their obsessions.

The Whirlpool

This stunning collection of 60 stories--over a century's worth of the best Canadian literature by an extraordinary array of our finest writers--has been selected and is introduced by award-winning writer Jane Urquhart. Urquhart's selection includes stories by major literary figures such as Mavis Gallant, Carol Shields, Alistair MacLeod, and Margaret Atwood, and wonderful stories by younger writers, including Dennis Bock, Joseph Boyden, and Madeleine Thien. This collection is uniquely organized into five parts: the immigrant experience, urban life, family drama, fantasy and metaphor, and celebrating the past.

The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories

From one of our nation’s most beloved and iconic authors comes a lyrical 150th birthday gift to Canada. Jane Urquhart chooses 50 Canadian objects and weaves a rich and surprising narrative that speaks to our collective experience as a nation. Each object is beautifully illustrated by the noted artist Scott McKowen, with Jane Urquhart conjuring and distilling meaning and magic from these unexpected facets of our history. The fifty artifacts range from a Nobel Peace Prize medal, a literary cherry tree, a royal cowcatcher, a Beothuk legging, a famous skull and an iconic artist’s shoe, as well as an Innu tea doll, a Sikh RCMP turban, a Cree basket, a Massey-Harris tractor and a hanging rope, among an array of unexpected and intriguing objects. Bringing the curiosity of the novelist and the eloquence of the poet to her task, Jane Urquhart composes a symphonic memory bank with objects that resonate with symbolic significance. In this compelling portrait of a completely original country called Canada, a master novelist has given all of us a national birthday bouquet like no other.

Stories About Canada Told Through 50 Objects

A Number of Things

Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward’s ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.

Alice Munro hails Urquhart's "most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives." "Urquhart's writing is poetic, in the sense that it is beautifully compact and restrained when describing the most powerful emotions," says The Times. The author Claire Messud praises her as having "a great gift for the historical novel, for the melding of ideas, events and individuals into a significant whole." In Sanctuary Line Urquhart has created a nuanced and moving novel about family legacies, love, and betrayal. Solitary, nostalgic Liz Crane returns to her family's now-deserted farmhouse--once the setting for countless happy summers spent on the northern shore of Lake Erie--to study the migratory habits of the Monarch butterfly. Encompassing all the colorful stories and blarney of successful Irish immigrants who have made the most of their relocation to North America, the Cranes' rich family history is now circumscribed by sadness. Liz's beloved cousin Amanda, a gifted military strategist, has been killed in Afghanistan, a loss that had been foreshadowed many years in the past by the disappearance of Amanda's charismatic father. Reflecting on the fragility and transience of human life and relations--mirrored in the butterflies' restless flight patterns and transcontinental migrations--Liz finds that love is there to be found where, and when, you least expect it.

Sanctuary Line

National bestseller From one of our nation’s most beloved and iconic authors comes a lyrical 150th birthday gift to Canada Award-winning author Jane Urquhart explores fifty Canadian objects that tell us who we are in a way never before done. The Globe and Mail praises Urquhart in writing about these objects “with an ethereal, emotional tangibility that is both nostalgic and energetic.” The artefacts include a Nobel Peace Prize medal, a literary cherry tree, a royal cowcatcher, a Beothuk legging, a famous skull and an iconic artist’s shoe, as well as an Innu tea doll, a Sikh RCMP turban, a Cree basket, a Massey-Harris tractor and a hanging rope, among an array of other unexpected and intriguing objects. Each object is beautifully illustrated by the noted artist Scott McKowen, with Jane Urquhart conjuring and distilling meaning and magic from these unexpected facets of our history. In this compelling portrait of a completely original country called Canada, a master novelist has given all of us a national birthday bouquet like no other.

Stories of Canada Told Through Fifty Objects

Michael Ondaatje

The fonds consists of a single diary kept by Jane Urquhart from 1974 to 1981, before she began her writing career, and documents primarily several trips to Europe taken with Tony Urquhart. This diary served as a sketchbook, journal and trip diary, and contains drawings and sketches, photographs, ephemera, plant material, etc. Its 258 pages contain 71 sketches, drawings and watercolours including 27 by Tony Urquhart, 32 by Jane Urquhart, 2 by Michael Ondaatje and 10 by other artists.

Jane Urquhart Fonds

An internationally celebrated novelist today, Jane Urquhart began her literary career as a poet. Some Other Garden brings together in a special new edition, illustrated by the beautiful photographs of Jennifer Dickson, two of Urquhart’s early poetry collections. These poems centre on another time and place while vividly evoking life in the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, as seen through the dispassionate eyes of one of his most influential mistresses, Madame de Montespan. Set amidst the ornate gardens and backrooms of the palace of Versailles, the poems brilliantly map the play of desire, vanity, dominance, and mortality that transpires within a king’s garden. From the chateau at Marly and the machinations of the court at Versailles, to the worms that play their final game of love beneath the statues in the garden, Urquhart renders the intrigues of court and romantic entanglement with startling imagery and astonishing craftsmanship. Some Other Garden is a dazzling work of imagination from one of Canada’s most beloved writers.

Some Other Garden

Jeremy Cooper

John Ward

Jonathan Benington

The Art of Jane Urquhart (1947-83)

A Hymn to Love

A Novel

`In 1986, Jane Urquhart published her first novel, The Whirlpool, to almost universal critical acclaim. When it met with a negative response, it tended to offend or bemuse because of its imaginative content. In The Whirlpool, Urquhart treated reality with contempt. She was clearly a courageous stylist with a unique vision. Now, with Storm Glass, the courage of the stylist is confirmed and the uniqueness of the vision is expanded. `Though most of the stories here predate the writing of The Whirlpool, the reader is given the chance, once again, to explore the territory of dreams and memory so vividly established in that book. Clearly, this is a milieu in which Urquhart excels. `Other times and other places lend their colour to most of the stories in this collection. Windows and glass are also prominent. Some of the characters have no names and all of them are dreamers, though what they dream is hardly the stuff of which good sleep is made. Storm Glass is exhilarating precisely because the dreams of which it tells are so disturbing: disturbingly real and disturbingly familiar. Most readers will recognize the impulse here to wake up and escape the dream, but most will also recognize the tantalizing magic of dreams that keeps us going back for more.'

Storm Glass

A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family's complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.

Two worlds are intertwined in this hauntingly beautiful story as it moves from Toronto to the English moors and to Venice, Italy. The time frame shifts between present and past, linking the lives of a young Bront� scholar (a woman in the throes of a troubled love affair), a turn-of-the-century female balloonist, and an elusive explorer with the ghost – or the memory – of Emily Bront�. Urquhart reveals something about the act of artistic creation, the ways in which stories enter our lives, and about the cyclical nature of love throughout time. This is a novel of darkness and light, of intense weather and inner calm. From the Hardcover edition.

Jane Urquhart

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