Changing Heaven - Hardcover

Jane Urquhart was born in the far north of Ontario. She is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, among them The Whirlpool, which received France s Prix du Meilleur Livre ?tranger; Away, winner of the Trillium Award, The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General s Award and a finalist for the Orange Prize in the UK and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Governor General s Award and Britain s Booker Prize. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction and four books of poetry. She has written a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery and was editor of the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work, which is published in many countries, has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. She is a Chevalier dans l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Urquhart has received ten honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario and the Royal Military College of Canada. She has served on the Board of PEN Canada, on the Advisory Board for the Restoration of the Vimy Memorial and on several international prize juries including that of the International Dublin IMPAC Award, the Giller Prize, the Governor General s Award for Fiction and the American International Neustadt Award.

Her most recent novel, The Night Stages, was released in 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, McClelland and Stewart in Canada and Oneworld in the UK.

Urquhart lives in southeastern Ontario with her husband, artist Tony Urquhart.

Building on the reputation she established so resonantly in her first novel, The Whirlpool, Jane Urquhart now takes the reader on a magical and daring voyage - one that leads from the English moors (where the memory of Emily Bronte is as dark as it is magical) to Venice and modern-day Toronto. Changing Heaven tells the store of Ann, a young Bronte scholar, and of her doomed love affair with Arthur, an art historian obsessed with Tintoretto. Interwoven with this is the tragic, parallel tale of Arianna Ether, a turn-of the-century balloonist in love with the brooding Jeremy. These are no simple love stories: for as in the paintings of Tintoretto, light and shadow themselves become palpable forces; and as in the novels of Bronte, love and its storms (literal and figurative) take on transcendent meaning. Jane Urquhart masterfully blurs the lines between reality and memory, sequential time and imagined time, to produce a rich and powerful meditation on the act of artistic creation, the ways in which myths enter our lives, and the cyclical nature of love. Changing Heaven is a deeply moving work, by an author who is willing to test not only the limits of the conventional novel, but also the sensibilities of the reader - a writer able to throw a bridge between past and present, heaven and earth, and to do it with breathtaking skill.