Love Hurts

In her eighth novel, The Night Stages, Jane Urquhart revisits and elaborates themes familiar to readers from such earlier works as The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers. Anchored by the story of the creation of a monumental work of art, as well as the aesthetic and sentimental apprenticeship of the artist, her new novel explores the vicissitudes of familial and romantic love and the struggle to heal from its disappointments. The additional theme of a sustained and complex sibling rivalry makes The Night Stages equal to The Underpainter, which justly won the Governor General’s Award in 1997.

In the early 1960s, 40-­something Tamara Edgeworth, a British transplant to Ireland, finds herself grounded by fog for three days in Gander International Airport while en route to an uncertain future in New York City. This stalled condition illuminates...