Changing Heaven - Hardcover

Urquhart, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771086571 ISBN 13: 9780771086571

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1990

Synopsis

Two worlds are intertwined in this hauntingly beautiful story as it moves from Toronto to the English moors and to Venice, Italy. The time frame shifts between present and past, linking the lives of a young Brontė scholar (a woman in the throes of a troubled love affair), a turn-of-the-century female balloonist, and an elusive explorer with the ghost – or the memory – of Emily Brontė. Urquhart reveals something about the act of artistic creation, the ways in which stories enter our lives, and about the cyclical nature of love throughout time. This is a novel of darkness and light, of intense weather and inner calm.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0771086571
• ISBN 13: 9780771086571
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258