Jane Urquhart

A magnificent, elegiac, and compelling novel of intersecting lives, set mainly in Ireland in the 1950s and in the years before the war. A telling of the interconnected stories of Tamara, a former pilot during World War II; her married lover Niall, a charismatic Irishman and meteorologist; and his troubled younger brother Kieran who, at age 11, is separated from his family and fostered in a mountain home by a maternal countrywoman. Strongly evocative,...

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;...

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...

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. 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.