In Winter I Get Up at Night

A Novel

By: Jane Urquhart

Narrated by: Christine Horne

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTELLER • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books • One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024

From one of the greatest writers of our time comes a profound and moving novel of an unforgettable life.

In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart’s brilliant new novel, will leave the listener forever changed.

Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm—the “great wind” that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children’s ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter.

Emer’s tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.

In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time.

©2024 Jane Urquhart (P)2024 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

"A work of aching beauty alert always to the wondrous. Jane Urquhart is a master storyteller."—Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song

"The quiet intensity of this novel is suffused with love, potent and penetrating in its compassion. A book of remarkable tenderness."—Anne Michaels, author of Held

"An incandescent novel, slowly revealing its secrets and connections in lyrical prose and a looping narrative. Urquhart takes us into a child’s confused imagination, an adult’s poignant nostalgia, and a landscape of menacing beauty. Glimpses of strange phenomena and portraits of familiar figures are subtly melded into a glorious, satisfying whole."—Charlotte Gray, author of Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons