Jane Urquhart Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Whirlpool (1986)
  2. Changing Heaven (1990)
  3. Away (1993)
  4. The Underpainter (1997)
  5. The Stone Carvers (2001)
  6. A Map of Glass (2005)
  7. Sanctuary Line (2010)
  8. The Night Stages (2015)

Collections

  1. Storm Glass (1987)

Anthologies edited

  1. Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007)

Non fiction

  1. L M Montgomery (2011)
  2. A Number of Things (2016)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Jane Urquhart Books Overview

The Whirlpool

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 tranger Best Foreign Book Award in France and marked the brilliant debut of a major voice in Canadian fiction.

Changing Heaven

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.

Away

On the northern coast of Ireland, young Mary O’Malley embraces a semi conscious sailor washed ashore by the tide; so begins her family saga. Fleeing the great famine, she and her descendants migrate across the Atlantic, through the quarantine sheds and over the Canadian shield. They trek from Port Hope to Montreal to Ottawa, and finally to a house on the shore of Lake Ontario. Now, Esther O’Malley Robertson is on the move again, displaced by creeping industry

The Underpainter

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 Stone Carvers

When the world was still reeling from the staggering losses incurred in the First World War, an unknown Canadian sculptor was raising a colossal monument in France, where so many of his countrymen had fought and died. Unveiled in 1936, the Memorial at Vimy Ridge still stands as a stark reminder of the more than 11,000 Canadians who gave their lives in France and as a testament to the vision and single minded obsession of its now forgotten architect, Walter Allward. It is against the backdrop of this incredible achievement that Jane Urquhart sets her intricately woven new novel. At the center of the story is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master woodcarver, who spends her childhood in a German settled community in southwestern Ontario in the years leading up to the war. It is a childhood punctuated by tremendous losses: her mother dies of cancer when she is a teenager; her older brother disappears; and her brief but passionate love affair with Eamon O’Sullivan is cut short when he is killed in action. But Klara’s inherited gift for carving will reunite her with her brother and bring her unexpected happiness. In the tradition of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong and Pat Barker’s Regeneration, The Stone Carvers is vintage Jane Urquhart writing at the height of her powers.

A Map of Glass

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.

Sanctuary Line

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.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment