In Winter I Get Up at Night
A Novel
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4.0 • 30 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTELLER • Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Heather's Pick • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books • One of the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 • A Winnipeg Free Press Best Fiction Book of 2024
From one of the greatest writers of our time comes a profound and moving novel of an unforgettable life.
In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart’s brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed.
Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm—the “great wind” that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children’s ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter.
Emer’s tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.
In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
One of Canada’s most celebrated writers, Jane Urquhart, tells a unique and engrossing tale of a woman’s struggle with pain, love, and the complicated bonds of family. Emer McConnell teaches music and art in the prairie schools of Saskatchewan. It sounds like an ordinary existence, but her life has been anything but—as a child, she was literally picked up and tossed to the ground in a windstorm and spent months in a hospital as her broken bones healed and she tried to separate hallucination from reality. Later in life, she deals with a powerful but episodic relationship with a once-famous scientist, as well as a shocking family revelation. Urquhart gives this story a haunting mix of realism and dreamlike nuance, and it follows through to a deeply moving conclusion. It’s a thoughtful blend of shimmering beauty and stark reality that’s one of the year’s most compelling novels.
