A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [145]
19. Although one of the points of this novel is, as Sylvia tells Jerome, that “all of life is an exercise in forgetting” [p. 367], stories are one way to keep the past alive. Discuss some of the stories remembered, recorded, read, and told in the book, and the ways in which they echo or deepen the story. How does the memory of a particular story and its reader bring both joy and sorrow to Jerome at the end of the novel?
Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize; A Map of Glass, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; and, most recently, Sanctuary Line. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass; four books of poetry; a biography of L.M. Montgomery for the Extraordinary Canadians series; and the editor of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages.
Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada. She 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 held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto.
Jane Urquhart lives in Northumberland County, Ontario, and occasionally in Ireland.