Away

Literature & Fiction

URQUHART, JANE.

Contemporary

Penguin Group

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: A Novel

United States

Penguin??Books

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

In 1867 a good-natured Bavarian priest, is sent by God and mad King Ludwig to the wilds of North America. Soon the backwoods are transformed into a parish and the settlers into a congregation, and Joseph Becker, a woodcarver, meets his future wife. Several decades later, Joseph Becker teaches his astounding carving skills to his grandchildren. One of them, Klara, shows exceptional talent and has a surfeit of what the local nuns call "a fondness for men's work." Untamed, she falls in love with an Irish boy, Eamon O'Sullivan, only to have him leave to fight in the Great War . . .

The Stone Carvers

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Penguin Publishing Group

Extraordinary Canadians: Lucy Maud Montgomery

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Canada

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 Brontë 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 Brontë. 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.

Changing Heaven

Romance

Mcclelland Stewart Inc

Sceptre

Set mainly in a remote westerly tip of Ireland in the 1940s and '50s, this stunning new novel from one of Canada's bestselling authors is at once intimate and epic in scope.
Tam, an Englishwoman, has been living in this harshly beautiful region since shortly after World War II, in which she served as an auxiliary pilot. She is now leaving her lover, Niall, who, like his father before him, is a meteorologist. On her way to New York, the airliner she is traveling on becomes grounded by heavy fog at Gander Airport in Newfoundland. As she waits for the fog to clear, she notices an enigmatic mural that moves her to revisit not only the circumstances that brought her to Ireland but her intense relationship with Niall and his growing despondency over the disappearance of his younger brother, Kieran. 
We learn of Kieran's troubled childhood and of the tragedy that caused him as a boy to be separated from his family and taken in by a widowed countrywoman who lives in the mountains. There he comes to know the local people, among them a tailor, a fisherman-teacher, and a sheep farmer who is an astonishing philosopher. There is also the jeweler's daughter, a young woman who will come to change the course of several lives. Running parallel is the story of the painter Kenneth Lochhead and his creation of the mural at Gander that is Tam's only companion through three long days and nights.
An elegiac novel of unusual emotional depth, The Night Stages explores the meaning of separation, the sorrows of fractured families, and the profound effect of Ireland's wild and elemental landscape on lives shaped by its beauty. It is Jane Urquhart's richest, most rewarding novel to date.

The Night Stages: A Novel

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

An intricate, passionately crafted novel chronicles the involvement of a stonecarver from Canada named Klara Becker as she participates in creating a monument in Paris to the eleven thousand Canadians that died in World War I. 15,000 first printing.

Viking Adult

Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories

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.

Short Stories & Anthologies

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