Away

Away is a rich and elegiac novel celebrating the indomitable spirit of three generations of Irish immigrants as they struggle in the often harsh and uninviting wilderness that was Upper Canada. Forced to leave their home on the island of Rathlin off the northern coast of Ireland in the wake of the devastating potato famines of the 1840s, the O'Malley family attempted to build a new life for themselves in a country full of promise. From her home on the shores of Lake Ontario, Esther O'Malley Robertson, the last of the line, looks lingeringly back on her family's history, from the rough days of survival to flourishing times in Port Hope, Montreal, and Ottawa, a history that mirrors the country's growth and development as well. It's a rich and lyrical fiction that simmers with dark and sombre echoes of the novels of Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë, but with its own unique sense of adventure. Blending politics and history, myth and magic in a novel that won the 1994 Trillium Award, Urquhart takes readers on an intensely emotional journey into the lives of ordinary men and women as seen through the extraordinary eye of this Canadian original. --Jeffrey Canton

Author: Jane Urquhart

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Year: 2006