Spanning three decades and two continents, Jane Urquhart’s novel follows the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art
Jane Urquhart
A Canadian novelist’s multi-generational story of a family of carvers used the First World War as a way to look at memory, history and the redemptive powers of art
Jane Urquhart is a much decorated novelist and poet. Coming from immigrant stock, her own family heritage informs The Stone Carvers, a novel of shifting timelines that follows three generations of a Canadian family and the motivations behind their missions to found a church in rural Canada and later to work on the Vimy Memorial in France, a commemoration of the unknown victims of the First World War. The novel was praised for Urquhart’s richly evocative prose, which clearly owes something to her skills as a poet.