With stunning virtuosity, the stories in Jane Urquhart’s dazzling first book of fiction unearth universal truths as they reach across countries and eras. A woman runs away to a cottage in the English moors to escape a love affair; shards of glass reconcile a middle-aged wife to her husband’s estrangement; a grandmother makes a startling confession from her youth; a young woman discovers herself through the life of an Italian saint; and, in a spellbinding story of artistic jealousy, we enter the mind of poet Robert Browning at the end of his life. In these beautifully crafted stories, ordinary objects brim with meaning and memories radiate with significance as Jane Urquhart illuminates the things that lie just beneath the surface of our lives. “Urquhart combines the poet’s passionate feeling for language and the material world with nearly a classicist’s sense of form.…A lavishness of imagination is brought to bear on small moments, and the writing is of such intensity that a character is often revealed in one expression, a way of life disclosed in a single scene.…”
–Ken Adachi, Toronto Star

“A collection of mythic, dreamlike stories.…Description of her tales belittles their strength and cannot convey the elegance of her prose.”
–Kingston Whig-Standard

“Urquhart has impressive talent. There’s nothing simple and obvious here; concentric circles of meaning ripple out from the stories, and the prose shimmers like reflections in a deep pool.…”
–Globe and Mail