Urquhart presents Sanctuary Line Dec. 4

Canadian author Jane Urquhart will present her new novel Sanctuary Line at Books & Company Saturday, Dec. 4 at 2 p.m. Admission is free of charge.
Prior to the reading, she will host a fundraising luncheon at noon for the 2011 Prince Edward County Authors festival. The lunch will be upstairs, in the Lipson Room at Books & Company, catered by Miss Lily’s Café. Tickets are $25.
“No other Canadian novelist knows more about the history of rural southern Ontario than Jane Urquhart…and no other novelist employs that knowledge to such striking effect.” Toronto Star
Set in the present day on a farm at the shores of Lake Erie, Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line weaves elements from the 19th-century past, in Ireland and Ontario, into a contemporary story of the events in the lives of the members of one family.
Liz Crane, an entomologist, has moved into the family’s now-deserted farmhouse, in which she has spent almost every summer of her life. Here, she is close to the sanctuary where she’s been hired to study the migratory patterns and survival techniques of the Monarch butterfly. Casting a shadow over her life is the recent death of her cousin, Amanda Butler, a gifted military strategist killed in Afghanistan on a tour of duty, and the disappearance many years earlier of Amanda’s father, an irrepressible chronicler of the Butler family lore and a charismatic authority figure.
In this eloquent and powerful narrative, Jane Urquhart brings to vivid life the things of the past that make us who we are, and illuminates the sometimes difficult path to understanding and forgiveness.

Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She 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, winner of the Trillium 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; and A Map of Glass, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass, and four books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, and Some Other Garden). Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
She lives in southwestern Ontario.

Books & Company, 289 Main Street, Picton, Ontario
613-476-3037 www.pictonbookstore.com or www.pecauthorfest.com

Dramatic stories of home children lead to novel

Local writer explores how British social upheavals created Canadians-in-the-making.
Book Launch is Nov. 20, 2-4pm., at Books and Company, Picton

Between 1869 and 1940 thousands of destitute youngsters were plucked from appalling conditions in Britain and sent overseas as Home Children, a number to the Quinte region. Many hid their origins even from their own families.
Intrigued by the many untold stories, Prince Edward County writer, Gail Hamilton has used the origins of the Home Children movement as a springboard to fictionally explore the forces impelling both children and adults to trade England at her peak for a wild chance on distant Canada.
The Tomorrow Country is set in the turbulent London of the 1870s, when the industrial revolution created immense wealth while
also plunging vast numbers into abject poverty. Buffeted by unprecedented social upheaval, reformers fought to better conditions, mavericks grasped at glittering opportunities and children were abandoned in the streets.
Centred around the efforts of a genteel radical to rescue children for emigration to Canada, Gail fills the novel with social climbers,
adventure, romance, obsession, ingenious criminal schemes and desperate struggles for survival, all driving a determined set of
characters to reject the constraints of the Old World and turn their hopes to Canada, the Tomorrow Country.
The book is especially timely since 2010 has been declared the Year of the Home Child and Canada post has issued a commemorative stamp. Canada has around four million descendants from these little immigrants and surging interest is leading the current generation to seek out and fill the gaps in their family tree. Gail expects to continue the story in subsequent novels set in Canada.
The Tomorrow Country is available from www.gailhamiltonwriter.com, on Amazon.ca and at Books and Company, Picton.
Gail Hamilton is an internationally published novelist living in Prince Edward County. Everyone is invited to meet Gail and enjoy coffee and treats at her book launch, Saturday, November 20, 2-4 pm. at Books and Company in Picton.