In Winter I Get Up at Night, Jane Urquhart
In Winter I Get Up at Night, Jane Urquhart
List: $26.00 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $13.00

In Winter I Get Up at Night

Author: Jane Urquhart

Narrator: Christine Horne

Unabridged: 10 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/27/2024

Synopsis


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.

About The Author

JANE URQUHART, one of Canada’s best loved writers, was born in the north (in Little Longlac, Ontario), and grew up in Northumberland County and Toronto. She is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, which have received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; the Trillium Award; and the Governor General’s Award, and have been finalists or longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; the Orange Prize; The Giller Prize; the Booker Prize; and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, among others.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela M on March 27, 2025

This is an excellent piece of Canadian historical fiction that takes the reader to Saskatchewan, the Northern Plains in the 1920’s. It’s introspective with a sense of sadness that permeates the story moving back and forth in time with flashbacks and memories from eleven year old Emer and her later i......more

Goodreads review by Krista on March 27, 2024

As a child it would put me in mind of a line of that poem that had been read aloud to us by our poetry-loving Master back in Ontario: “‘In winter I get up at night ,’” he had begun, “‘and dress by yellow candle-light.’” Then came the musical rhythm of poetics, with a onesyllabled final verse that......more

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on May 07, 2025

A young Saskatchewan girl, at the liminal age of eleven, has been severely injured in a cyclone at her family farm. Emer ends up in the children’s ward of a hospital, uncertain what has happened to her family. This is decades ago, not exactly an enlightened era of the twentieth century, but the girl......more

Goodreads review by Ann on September 29, 2024

I am so glad that I did not miss this beautiful, moving novel by Jane Urquhart, whose work I had not previously read. The setting is Saskatchewan (the Northern Great Plains), beginning in the 1920’s. The narrator is Emer, now an older woman, who recounts her life, through lovely, thoughtful language......more

Goodreads review by Betsy on February 26, 2025

This beautiful lyrical mosaic of events or eras in the life of a teacher who grew up in Ontario and Saskatchewan erupts like a sleeping, hidden monster on page 230. That's all I will say. Enjoy the lyricism, a childhood perfectly enshrouded with a child's misunderstanding and an adulthood conveyed wi......more

Quotes

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 Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024 • A Winnipeg Free Press Best Fiction Book of 2024 • One of CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of the Year


"A work of aching beauty alert always to the wondrous. Jane Urquhart is a master storyteller."
—Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song

"The quiet intensity of this novel is suffused with love, potent and penetrating in its compassion. A book of remarkable tenderness."
—Anne Michaels, author of Held

"An incandescent novel, slowly revealing its secrets and connections in lyrical prose and a looping narrative. Urquhart takes us into a child’s confused imagination, an adult’s poignant nostalgia, and a landscape of menacing beauty. Glimpses of strange phenomena and portraits of familiar figures are subtly melded into a glorious, satisfying whole."
—Charlotte Gray, author of Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons

“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. . . . 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.” —CBC Books

Awards

  • Scotiabank Giller Prize
Add to Cart
Add to Wish List