Changing Heaven - Softcover

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.

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.