The Night Stages
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
'Jane Urqhuart charts the restless weather of the human heart in the same observant, inventive way the ancient Greeks mapped the constellations.' Washington Post
A magnificent, elegiac novel of intersecting memories that explores the meaning of separation and reunion, the sorrows of fractured families, and the profound effect of Ireland's harshly beautiful landscape on lives lived in solitude
After a tragic accident leaves Tamara alone on the most westerly tip of Ireland, she begins an affair with a charismatic meteorologist named Niall. It’s the 1950s, and Tamara has settled into civilian life after working as an auxiliary pilot in World War II. At first her romance is filled with passionate secrecy, but when Niall’s younger brother, Kieran, disappears after a bicycle race, Niall, unable to shake the idea that he may be to blame, slowly falls into despondency. Distraught and abandoned after their decade-long relationship, Tamara decides she has no option but to leave.
Jane Urquhart’s mesmerizing novel opens as Tamara makes her way from Ireland to New York. During a layover in Gander, Newfoundland, a fog moves in, grounding her plane and stranding her in front of the airport’s mural. As she gazes at the nutcracker-like children, missile-shaped birds, and fruit blossoms, she revisits the circumstances that brought her to Ireland and the family entanglement that has forced her into exile. Slowly she interweaves her life story with Kieran’s as she searches for the truth about Niall.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Urquhart (Sanctuary Line) delivers an impressionistic and forlorn postwar romance. Framed by the career of an ingenious real-life artist named Kenneth, the novel emulates an actual mural of his, Gander Airport's Flight and Its Allegories. But only gradually is Kenneth's mural connected to the recollections of an auxiliary pilot named Tamara and the life she lived in rural Ireland with her lover, the meteorologist Niall and his tortured brother, Kieran. As Tamara and Niall live a life of relative calm punctuated by the gorgeously evoked Irish landscape and their memories of the war, Kieran becomes a bicycle racer and, following a prestigious race, disappears completely. Niall blames himself and undertakes a fruitless search for his brother. But Tamara understands Kieran's love of speed better than she admits, and even as she prepares to leave Ireland, a love triangle develops. Uruquart's evocative novel may not exactly break new ground, but passages rich with the aura of distant love make this novel a lovely dream of and emotional landscapes. Kieran, Tamara, and Niall are well drawn, never succumbing to stereotype or symbolic shorthand but the long chapters detailing Kenneth's labors on his mural make for laborious reading and come off as only incidentally connected to the central love story. For readers willing to surrender to the mood, this stands as an exemplar of both Canadian and Irish literature.
