Cette auteure est célébrée pour ses romans acclamés internationalement qui plongent dans les complexités de la psychologie et de l'histoire humaines. Son style distinctif mêle une prose lyrique à une profonde capacité d'explorer les relations complexes entre les personnages et leur environnement. À travers ses récits, elle examine des thèmes tels que la mémoire, la perte et la quête d'identité à travers diverses époques. Ses œuvres touchent les lecteurs par leur profondeur littéraire et leur puissance émotionnelle.
Exploring themes of love, identity, and memory, the stories delve into the lives of diverse characters across various settings. A woman seeks solace in the English moors, while a middle-aged wife confronts her husband's estrangement. A grandmother reveals a youthful secret, and a young woman finds her path through an Italian saint's life. The collection also offers a glimpse into Robert Browning's mind, revealing the complexities of artistic jealousy. Urquhart masterfully transforms ordinary objects into vessels of profound meaning.
The Underpainter is a novel of interwoven lives in which the world of art collides with the realm of human emotion. It is the story of Austin Fraser, an American painter now in his later years, who is haunted by memories of those whose lives most deeply touched his own, including a young Canadian soldier and china painter and the beautiful model who becomes Austin’s mistress. Spanning decades, the setting moves from upstate New York to the northern shores of two Great Lakes; from France in World War One to New York City in the ’20s and ’30s. Brilliantly depicting landscape and the geography of the imagination, The Underpainter is Jane Urquhart’s most accomplished novel to date. From the Hardcover edition.
This is a novel of intersecting memories that explores the meaning of separation and reunion, the sorrows of fractured families, and the profound effect of Ireland's harshly beautiful landscape on lives lived in solitude.
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 . . .
Jerome is a young earth-artist spending a few months on an island in Lake Ontario. But his idyll is shattered when he discovers a man frozen in the ice near the shore. One year later Sylvia, the dead man's lover, appears at his studio driven by the need to recount her story to the stranger who discovered him. A tender and haunting story unfolds which stretches long and wide, a story that begins with Sylvia's childhood and mysterious illness and ends with her lover's tragic death. This deeply evocative and romantic novel is about the fragility of love and memory, and the redemptive power of stories.
The award-winning author of The Whirlpool returns with a seductive, powerful, and humorous novel of the lives of four generations of extraordinary women that "charts the restless weather of the human heart . . . the way the ancient Greeks mapped the constellations" (Washington Post).
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, <i>A Map of Glass</i> 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. <i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>
Ein Sommer im Jahr 1889 an den Niagarafällen in Ontario. Es ist die Saison für leichtsinnige Wassersprünge, und die Witwe des Leichenbestatters ist mit Beerdigungen vollauf beschäftigt. Ihre Tage sind getrübt von dem unerklärlichen Schweigen ihres jungen Sohnes. Im Kick-Hotel haben Fleda und ihr Mann David ein Zimmer genommen, wie jedes Jahr, und Fleda träumt von ihrer Begegnung mit dem jungen Dichter Browning, die einst am Fuße der Niagarafälle stattfand und ihr ganzes Leben veränderte. Zur selben Zeit sinniert der Dichter Browning in Venedig über seinen nahenden Tod. Am Ende des Sommers verbinden sich die Schicksalsfäden dieser Menschen und ein Opfer wird im Strudel der Ereignisse zu beklagen sein.
