Storm Glass (18 page)
Authors: Jane Urquhart
How long, she wondered, did it take, from the break on the rocks, through the storms of different seasons, to the change? When did the edges cease to cut?
That night he came in tired and heavy, followed by the smell of making things come to be. He spoke of problems with the farm, of obstinate machinery that refused to function or of crops with inexplicable malformations—events that, even in the power of his stubbornness, he could never hope to control. And when he turned to look at her his eyes were like fresh broken glass: sharp, dangerous, alive. She answered him with kindness, though, knowing the storm ahead and then the softening of edges yet to come.
“There’s storm glass on the beach,” she said.
Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of three books of poetry,
I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles
, and
The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan
, a collection of short fiction,
Storm Glass
, and three previous internationally acclaimed novels,
The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven
, and
Away
. Her fiction has been translated into numerous foreign languages, and has earned her awards and honours, including the Trillium Award, the Marian Engel Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France, and, for her bestselling novel
Away
, a place on the shortlist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In the fall of 1997, her fourth novel,
The Underpainter
, was published to wide critical acclaim internationally, won the 1997 Governor General’s Award, was shortlisted for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and became a long-time national bestseller. She was recently named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
Urquhart has received five honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia.
Jane Urquhart lives in southwestern Ontario.
Copyright © 1987 by Jane Urquhart
McClelland & Stewart edition published 2000
First published by the Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1987
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Urquhart, Jane, 1949
Storm glass
eISBN: 978-1-55199-428-4
I. Title.
PS8591.R68S86 2000 C813’.54 C99-933024-1
PR9199.3.U76S86 2000
Many of these stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies.
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