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 Andrews body frozen in the ice later that winter, the rich narrative tapestry of 'A Map of Glass' begins. One year after Andrews body is found, Sylvia Bradley — a withdrawn, sheltered woman whose secret affair with Andrew opened her eyes to the world outside her small...

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 an...

Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust...

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 w...

Considerata l’erede di Alice Munro e Margaret Atwood, pluripremiata in patria e all’estero, Jane Urquhart costruisce una storia familiare emozionante e piena di mistero. Chiamata a lavorare in un centro di ricerca per studiare la migrazione delle farfalle monarca, l’entomologa Liz Crane si trasferisce a vivere nella fattoria in riva al lago dove ha trascorso le estati della sua infanzia. Il luogo, un tempo affollato da zii e cugini, e dai lavoratori che giungevano annualmente dal Messico p...

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 ...

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 ...

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 durin...

The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod’s As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories depict men and women acting out their “own peculiar mortality” against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change.His se...

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.

Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel weaves two parallel stories, set a century apart.Sylvia Bradley was rescued from her parents’ house by marriage to a doctor whose care has both nourished and imprisoned her. When she meets Andrew Woodman, a historical geographer, her world changes through their devastating and ecstatic affair.A year after Andrew’s death, Sylvia tells this story to Jerome McNaughton, a young artist whose discovery of Andrew’s body unlocks a secret in his ow...

A heartwarming tale of a boy, his dog, and the enduring power of loyalty in a changing world. Luke Baldwin's Vow tells the story of a young orphan navigating grief and finding solace in an unlikely friendship.When Luke's father passes away, he's sent to live with his practical Uncle Henry and kindly Aunt Helen in rural Canada. Homesick and lonely, Luke finds comfort in Dan, the farm's elderly, one-eyed collie. But when Uncle Henry deems Dan useless, Luke m...