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Each of her novels has brought Jane Urquhart increased attention and acclaim. Saturday Night described her novel Changing Heaven as a "beautifully written book" that "throbs with the storm and wind of passion" and Janice Kulyk Keefer has called Urquhart "One of the most compelling and accomplished voices in contemporary Canadian fiction." Of her enormously successful 1993 novel, Away, Timothy Findley wrote: "It is a great romantic tale - rich in imagery and with language worthy of Emily Brontė and Thomas Hardy. Like these writers, she is unafraid of words and spends them fearlessly. The uses to which she puts her command of language are beautiful and breathtaking."

Away earned Urquhart both national and international acclaim from critics and readers. On the Globe and Mail bestseller list for 132 weeks, a record for any Canadian book, Away has, to date, sold over 55,000 copies and was shortlisted for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her fiction has won such awards and honours as the Trillium Award, the Marian Engle Award, and France's Prix de meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award). She was recently named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. In addition to her four novels, The Whirlpool (1986), Changing Heaven (1990), Away (1993), and The Underpainter (September 1997), Urquhart also has written a collection of short stories, The Storm Glass (1987) and three volumes of poetry: False Shuffles (1982); I am Walking in the Garden of his Imaginary Palace (1982) and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (1983).

Readers enchanted with Away are eagerly awaiting the September release of Urquhart's new novel The Underpainter. Called, "her most mature, ambitious and best work of fiction to date," The Underpainter is a novel which juxtaposes love and art, spanning decades and traversing several landscapes and locations. Urquhart's mastery of language and her ability to weave story and create memorable characters are in full force in this new novel. The Underpainter is Urquhart's fourth novel and, if anything like her previous novels, will be a rewarding and enchanting read. It is due to be released in Canada in September 1997 and later in the fall in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Readers unfamiliar with Urquhart's work will discover novels that display her ability to weave rich narrative tapestries which shift between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between real and imagined worlds, and between characters, their settings and their stories. In her first novel, The Whirlpool, a whirlpool at the base of the Niagara Falls pulls together the stories of a dying Robert Browing, a beautiful woman married to a military historian and in love with Browning's poetry, and, an undertaker's widow who lives near Niagara Falls. Changing Heaven intertwines the histories of a contemporary Brontė scholar who finds herself on the moors of England, a nineteenth-century balloonist named Arianna Ether, and the ghost of Emily Brontė. Away, set in both the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, in Ireland and in Canada, traces several generations of the O'Malley family. All three novels blend story, space, time, reality and myth into compelling, highly readable narratives by one of Canada's most exciting novelists.

Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario and grew up in Toronto. She has been writer-in-residence at a number of Canadian universities, most recently at the University of Toronto. She lives with her husband, artist Tony Urquhart, in a small town in southwestern Ontario.

Author profile written by Heidi LM Jacobs

• : a selected bibliography

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