Esther O'Malley Robertson gazes out at Lake Ontario from her home for
perhaps the last time. This house, highly charged with memories and
history, is part of a landscape that is now being swallowed by industry.
The story of her family's past has its beginnings in the 1840s off the
northern coast of Ireland, where a young woman embraced a semiconscious
sailor who had washed in with the tide, and later, with her husband and
young son, fled the famine for Canada. Jane Urquhart imbues the past
with a shimmering clarity as she takes us from the harsh Irish coast 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 to a large-windowed house at
the edge of a Great Lake. The characters who inhabit the world of this
novel include Liam O'Malley, a down-to-earth, first-generation
Irish-Canadian farmer; his sister, Eileen, whose passionate idealism
involves her, unwillingly, in a devastating act of betrayal; the
eccentric Sedgewick brothers, Anglo-Irish landlords who tinker with
science, art, and poetry; Exodus Crow, an extraordinary individual of
mixed native blood; Thomas Doherty, a man known for his wind machines
and his ability to charm skunks; Aidan Lanighan, a charismatic Irish
nationalist with an obsessive interest in D'Arcy McGee; and Mary
O'Malley, whose unusual love of a man leads her to a strange but
inevitable fate in a new land. Away is a graceful and moving novel that
unites the personal and the political and explores the most private,
often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to
ourselves endure. Written in sensuous, evocativeprose, Away will confirm
Jane Urquhart as one of the most accomplished novelists of our day.
