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In Winter I Get Up At Night, a profound and moving novel of an unforgettable life, from Jane Urquhart, one of the greatest writers of our time.

About In Winter I Get Up At Night

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 traveling theater 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.

Source: Publisher
ISBN: 9780771051999
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada
Publication Date: August 27, 2024

Praise for In Winter I Get Up At Night

“[A] work of aching beauty alert always to the wondrous. Jane Urquhart is a master storyteller.”—Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song

“The quiet intensity of [In Winter I Get Up at Night] is suffused with love, potent and penetrating in its compassion. A book of remarkable tenderness.”—Anne Michaels, author of Held

“An incandescent novel, slowly revealing its secrets and connections in lyrical prose and a looping narrative. Urquhart takes us into a child’s confused imagination, an adult’s poignant nostalgia, and a landscape of menacing beauty. Glimpses of strange phenomena and portraits of familiar figures are subtly melded into a glorious, satisfying whole.”—Charlotte Gray, author of Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons

About Jane Urquhart, Author of In Winter I Get Up At Night

Jane Urquhart, one of Canada’s best loved writers, was born in the north, ( in Little Longlac, Ontario), and grew up in Northumberland County and Toronto. 

Jane Urquhart is the author of seven acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award; The Stone Carvers, a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize; and A Map of Glass, a finalist for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, and, most recently, Sanctuary Line. 

She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass, and four books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, and Some Other Garden. 

Source: Publisher
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada

Titles by Jane Urquhart

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