A Map of Glass: Summary and book reviews of A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart, plus links to an excerpt from A Map of Glass and a biography of Jane Urquhart.
A Map of Glass
by Jane Urquhart
Hardcover: Mar 2006,
375 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2007,
375 pages.
The eagerly anticipated new novel from the best-selling Canadian author of The Stone Carvers and The Underpainter.
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 the old man’s body frozen in the ice later that winter, the rich narrative tapestry of
A Map of Glass begins.
One year after Andrew’s body is discovered, Sylvia Bradley – a withdrawn, sheltered woman whose secret affair with Andrew changed her world forever – decides to learn more about her lover’s mysterious disappearance. She flees to the overwhelming, unfamiliar city of Toronto on a quest to find Jerome. Once she does, they work together to uncover both the secrets of their own pasts and the breathtaking story of Andrew’s ancestors.
With her celebrated lyrical prose and haunting imagery, Urquhart’s A Map of
Glass is a skillful exploration of love, loss, and the transitory nature of place.
Urquhart continues her interest in unconventional art forms, a theme that has run through two of her previous novels, The Stone Carvers and The Underpainter, with a story that rewards the patient reader. (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Kirkus Reviews
Her story flies in too many directions, and is hamstrung by appallingly portentous, theme-driven dialogue. At her best, this writer commands an impressive range of varied literary skills. But here, simpler would have been better.
Library Journal
The book starts slowly and quietly but rewards patient reading; at play here are big themes about the impermanence of everything: relationships, memory, possessions, civilizations, and even the landscape.
Quill & Quire
A serious, mature novel abundantly displaying the skill Urquhart has built up over decades in her poetry and prose.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Urquhart's passion for the past is at full poetic play in this intricate story of love, loss and memory.
Winnepeg Free Press
She displays a masterful command of language and a grasp of the complexities that form the tapestry of each person.
Jane Urquhart was born
in the small northern Ontario mining community of Little Long Lac and spent her later childhood and adolescence in Toronto.
She has published three books of poetry (I'm Walking in the Garden of His
Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of
Madame de Montespan), six novels (The Whirlpool, Changing
Heaven, Away, The Underpainter, The Stonecarvers and A
May of Glass), and a collection of
short fiction (Storm Glass) as well as numerous articles and reviews.
Her books have been published in many countries, including Holland, France,
Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, and The United States, and have
been translated into several languages.
She lives in a Southwestern Ontario
village with her husband, Tony Urquhart. A paperback of A Map of Glass was published in Canada last year, but has just been released in the USA.
With her inimitable grace and compassion, Jane Hamilton has created a novel full of gentle humor and rich insights into the nature of love and the deep, mysterious bonds that hold families together.
Told from Frank's perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him.
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(498 words).
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly
