Sanctuary Line - Softcover

""Sanctuary Line" is delicately balanced, powerful and purposeful, and is Urquhart at her best, a storyteller and stylist of the first rank." "Gary Curtis, "Hamilton Spectator"""

Praise for Jane Urquhart:

"The most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives." "Alice Munro""

Praise for "Sanctuary Line"

"Captures very deftly the sense of a disappearing world, created with such personal sacrifice by the first settlers... Urquhart handles the layers of narrative with lyrical aplomb." "Susan Elderkin, "The Financial Times"""

"[A] finely tuned read." ""Kirkus Reviews"""

"The payoff in "Sanctuary Line" is... spectacular--a multiple detonation that reverberates back to many earlier events and phrases." "David Grylls, "Sunday Times"""

"I'm grateful to have spent time with "Sanctuary Line" and soaked up Urquhart's nuanced wisdom." ""Vancouver Sun"""

"A lovely reverie from its first sentence." ""More" magazine""

Praise for Jane Urquhart:
"The most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives." "Alice Munro""

Praise for "Sanctuary Line"
"Captures very deftly the sense of a disappearing world, created with such personal sacrifice by the first settlers... Urquhart handles the layers of narrative with lyrical aplomb." "Susan Elderkin, "The Financial Times"""

"[A] finely tuned read." Kirkus Reviews"

Alice Munro hails Urquhart's "most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives." "Urquhart's writing is poetic, in the sense that it is beautifully compact and restrained when describing the most powerful emotions," says The Times. The author Claire Messud praises her as having "a great gift for the historical novel, for the melding of ideas, events and individuals into a significant whole."

In Sanctuary Line Urquhart has created a nuanced and moving novel about family legacies, love, and betrayal. Solitary, nostalgic Liz Crane returns to her family's now-deserted farmhouse--once the setting for countless happy summers spent on the northern shore of Lake Erie--to study the migratory habits of the Monarch butterfly. Encompassing all the colorful stories and blarney of successful Irish immigrants who have made the most of their relocation to North America, the Cranes' rich family history is now circumscribed by sadness. Liz's beloved cousin Amanda, a gifted military strategist, has been killed in Afghanistan, a loss that had been foreshadowed many years in the past by the disappearance of Amanda's charismatic father.

Reflecting on the fragility and transience of human life and relations--mirrored in the butterflies' restless flight patterns and transcontinental migrations--Liz finds that love is there to be found where, and when, you least expect it.