Best Selling Books by Jane Urquhart

Written in luminous prose,The Whirlpoolis a haunting tale set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in the summer of 1889. This is the season of reckless river stunts, a time when the undertaker’s widow is busy with funerals, her days shadowed by her young son’s curious silence. Across the street in Kick’s Hotel, where Fleda and her husband, David McDougal, have temporary rooms, Fleda dreams of the place above the whirlpool where she first encountered the poet, a man who enters her life and, unwittingly, changes everything. As the summer progresses, the lives of these characters become entangled, and darker, more sinister currents gain momentum. The Whirlpool, Jane Urquhart’s first novel, received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France and marked the brilliant debut of a major voice in Canadian fiction.

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 . . .

From the #1 national bestselling author of Away, The Stone Carvers, and A Map of Glass, Sanctuary Line is the eagerly anticipated new novel by Jane Urquhart. Set in the present day on a farm at the shores of Lake Erie, Jane Urquhart''s stunning new novel weaves elements from the nineteenth-century past, in Ireland and Ontario, into a gradually unfolding contemporary story of events in the lives of the members of one family that come to alter their futures irrevocably. There are ancestral lighthouse-keepers, seasonal Mexican workers; the migratory patterns and survival techniques of the Monarch butterfly; the tragedy of a young woman''s death during a tour of duty in Afghanistan; three very different but equally powerful love stories. Jane Urquhart brings to vivid life the things of the past that make us who we are, and reveals the sometimes difficult path to understanding and forgiveness. "From the Hardcover edition."

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.

With stunning virtuosity, the stories in Jane Urquhart’s dazzling first book of fiction unearth universal truths as they reach across countries and eras. A woman runs away to a cottage in the English moors to escape a love affair; shards of glass reconcile a middle-aged wife to her husband’s estrangement; a grandmother makes a startling confession from her youth; a young woman discovers herself through the life of an Italian saint; and, in a spellbinding story of artistic jealousy, we enter the mind of poet Robert Browning at the end of his life. In these beautifully crafted stories, ordinary objects brim with meaning and memories radiate with significance as Jane Urquhart illuminates the things that lie just beneath the surface of our lives.

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.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTELLER • Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Heather''s Pick • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books • One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024 From one of the greatest writers of our time comes a profound and moving novel of an unforgettable life. In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart’s brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed. Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm—the “great wind” that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children’s ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter. Emer’s tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world. In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time.

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.

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.

Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel weaves two parallel stories, one set in contemporary Toronto and Prince Edward County, Ontario, the other in the nineteenth century on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. Sylvia Bradley was rescued from her parents’ house by a doctor attracted to and challenged by her withdrawn ways. Their subsequent marriage has nourished her, but ultimately her husband’s care has formed a kind of prison. When she meets Andrew Woodman, a historical geographer, her world changes. A year after Andrew’s death, Sylvia makes an unlikely connection with Jerome McNaughton, a young Toronto artist whose discovery of Andrew’s body on a small island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River unlocks a secret in his own past. After Sylvia finds Jerome in Toronto, she shares with him the story of her unusual childhood and of her devastating and ecstatic affair with Andrew, a man whose life was irrevocably affected by the decisions of the past. At the breathtaking centre of the novel is the compelling tale of Andrew’s forebears. We meet his great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodman, whose ambitions brought him from England to the northeastern shores of Lake Ontario, during the days of the flourishing timber and shipbuilding industries; Joseph’s practical, independent and isolated daughter, Annabel; and his son, Branwell, an innkeeper and a painter. It is Branwell’s eventual liaison with an orphaned French-Canadian woman that begins the family’s new generation and sets the stage for future events. A novel about loss and the transitory nature of place, A Map of Glass is vivid with evocative prose and haunting imagery—a lake of light on a wooden table; a hotel gradually buried by sand; a fully clothed man frozen in an iceberg; a blind woman tracing her fingers over a tactile map. Containing all of the elements for which Jane Urquhart’s writing is celebrated, it stands as her richest, most accomplished novel to date.

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.

While her beloved fictional characters inhabited a world where love and community could overcome most tribulations, Lucy Maud Montgomery''s own life was marked by inescapable grief and loneliness. Raised virtually as an orphan by grandparents unable to give her much affection, Montgomery was nevertheless an optimistic and enthusiastic young woman, able to delight in her literary success and in the company of her wider family and friens.

When Stella, fresh from her life in the city, arrives to take up her first teaching post in the one-room schoolhouse in a little frontier settlement in the British Columbia interior, she soon finds herself immersed in the stories she is told. Although an outsider in their midst, she sees that for those who dwell in this tiny community, life follows its destined course, amid conditions of extraordinary Depression-era hardship. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.

A la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, trois jeunes Canadiens se retrouvent en France : Klara, son frère Tilman et Giorgio l''ami de ce dernier. Ils sont engagés par le sculpteur Walter Allward qui a été chargé de réaliser le monument aux morts de Vimy en hommage aux militaires canadiens morts pendant le conflit.

"Jeden Sommer ihrer Kindheit hat Liz auf den Obstplantagen ihres Onkels am Eriesee verbracht. Jeden Sommer hat sie darauf gewartet, dass ihr Lieblingsbaum sich orange färben würde, lodernd von unzähligen Schmetterlingen, die sich auf ihrer Wanderung dort niederließen. Jetzt ist Liz vierzig und zurückgekehrt, um als Entomologin den Monarchenfalter zu erforschen. Doch während sie auf dem verlassenen Gut umherstreift, steigen die Erinnerungen auf: Was ist geschehen in jenem Sommer, in dem so vieles zerbrach? Wohin ist ihr Onkel verschwunden, und wäre sie glücklich geworden mit Theo, ihrer ersten großen Liebe, dem mexikanischen Jungen, mit dem sie so viel mehr verband, als sie ahnen konnte? Mit Sensibilität und Sprachmacht lässt Jane Urquhart eine Familiengeschichte und eine Landschaft derart lebendig werden, wie es wohl nur eine der ganz großen kanadischen Erzählerinnen vermag."

While her beloved fictional characters inhabited a world where love and community could overcome most tribulations, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s own life was marked by inescapable grief and loneliness. Raised virtually as an orphan by grandparents unable to give her much affection, Montgomery was nevertheless an optimistic and enthusiastic young woman, able to delight in her literary success and in the company of her wider family and friends. But after marrying a clergyman beset by a debilitating mental illness, she struggled to maintain appearances. Even as she sustained her prolific output of fiction and won adoring fans worldwide, depression slowly engulfed her. Jane Urquhart explores the fascinating contradictions embodied by this enduring artist in whose fiction the imagination lights a way through the darkness, but in whose life the creeping shadows would ultimately shut out everything but the work.

Paysagiste et portraitiste devenu peintre abstrait, Austin Fraser retrace, au soir de sa vie, sa trajectoire d''artiste et d''homme. Dans ce roman métaphorique, le narrateur s''emploie à décrypter et exorciser le passé en le faisant resurgir. Il s''agit pour lui de retrouver les dessous du tableau ... Livre best-seller au Canada.

Il est des livres étranges qui s''impriment dans l''esprit et pénètrent l''imagination pour longtemps. La foudre et le sable où s''entremêlent épopée des Irlandais du Canada et mythologies d''Irlande est de ceux-là. Tous est magie dans ce somptueux roman marqué au sceau d''une passion indestructible, celle que la jeune mary éprouvera tout au long de sa vie pour un marin naufragé, mort entre ses bras sur une plage de la petite île irlandaise de Rathlin, vers 1840, et qu''elle n''aura de cesse de rejoindre dans un ailleurs improbable, jusqu''au fin fond du Canada ? Magique également la narration qui, de Mary à sa fille Eileen puis à son arrière-petite-fille Esther, évoque une lignée de femmes passionnées et opiniâtres, un héritage spirituel où les sortilèges d''amour se font écho, dans uns secrète correspondance entre les sentiments humains et les forces de la nature.