The Whirlpool - Softcover

Urquhart, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156792171X ISBN 13: 9781567921717

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2000

Synopsis

A literary romance, with a rich cast of characters, set on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in the summer of 1889.

In her stunning debut novel, renowned Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart staked her claim as a major storyteller of her generation. It is the summer at Niagara Falls and the undertaker’s wife is busy, for this is the season of crazy stunts and frequent accidents. Across the street, in Kirk’s Hotel, Fleda McDougal lives and breathes to the sonorous rhythms of Robert Browning’s poetry. Her emotionally distant husband, Major David McDougal, is a military historian, who only comes to life when arguing that Canada, and not the United States, really won the War of 1812.

And it is in this place, beside the Niagara whirlpool, in a glade below the falls, that Fleda first encounters the chronically ill clerk and would-be poet, Patrick―the man destined to change her life.

The New York Times wrote, “A strange and sensual first novel. . . Miss Urquhart is a special writer, worth watching on both sides of Niagara Falls.” This is for any lover of Victorian-era fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Urquhart is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, which won the Trillium Award and was a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, which won the Governor General s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers Trust Fiction Prize; and The Stone Carvers, a finalist for the 2001 Giller Prize and for the Governor General's Award for Fiction. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass, and three books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan were published together in 2000 in a one-volume collector s edition entitled Some Other Garden). Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award, and has been named a Chevalier dans l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. She was also the 2003 recipient of Alberta's Bob Edwards Award.


Urquhart has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia.

Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She now lives outside of Toronto.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156792171X
• ISBN 13: 9781567921717
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214