Most Popular Books by Jane Urquhart

Alice Munro is universally acknowledged as the finest short fiction writer in English. Bringing together ten incomparable stories from six different collections, No Love Lost confirms her pre-eminent status. Focusing on the many paths of falling in love, each of these stories of ordinary people reveals new truths about people as real – and as extraordinary – as ourselves. In selecting this unique gathering of stories, Jane Urquhart noted the brilliance of Munro’s fiction, suggesting that Munro''s genius guides us “through love’s labyrinth, insisting all the while that we keep our eyes wide open to its complicated foliage, its shadows, its piercing blasts of light.” Contents: Bardon Bus (from The Moons of Jupiter) Carried Away (from Open Secrets) Mischief (from Who Do You Think You Are?) The Love of a Good Woman (from The Love of a Good Woman) Simon’s Luck (from Who Do You Think You Are?), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) The Bear Came Over the Mountain (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) The Albanian Virgin (from Open Secrets) Meneseteung (from Friend of My Youth) The Children Stay (from The Love of a Good Woman)

Written in luminous prose, The Whirlpool is 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 . . .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An aging Andrew Woodman stumbles through a snowstorm, slowly losing his strength, his language, and his memories of the once-familiar island landscape around him. When Jerome, a young artist on a remote island retreat, discovers Andrew’s body frozen in the ice later that winter, the rich narrative tapestry of ''A Map of Glass'' begins. One year after Andrew’s body is found, Sylvia Bradley — a withdrawn, sheltered woman whose secret affair with Andrew opened her eyes to the world outside her small home town — decides to learn more about her lover’s mysterious disappearance. She flees to the overwhelming, unknown city of Toronto on a quest to find Jerome. Once she does, they work together to uncover both the secrets of their own pasts and the breathtaking story of Andrew’s ancestors. With her celebrated lyrical prose and haunting imagery, Urquhart’s ''A Map of Glass'' is a skillful exploration of love, loss, and the transitory nature of place.

"At the end of an affair, a woman pilot in World War II recalls life in a remote Irish town where her husband and his brother lost everything in a bicycle race"--

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTELLER • Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Heather''s Pick • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books • One of the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 • A Winnipeg Free Press Best Fiction Book of 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.

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.

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.

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.