The Stone Carvers

Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward’s ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.

Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward's ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.

The Underpainter is a novel of interwoven lives in which the world of art collides with the realm of human emotion. It is the story of Austin Fraser, an American painter now in his later years, who is haunted by memories of those whose lives most deeply touched his own, including a young Canadian soldier and china painter and the beautiful model who becomes Austin’s mistress. Spanning decades, the setting moves from upstate New York to the northern shores of two Great Lakes; from France in World War One to New York City in the ’20s and ’30s. Brilliantly depicting landscape and the geography of the imagination, The Underpainter is Jane Urquhart’s most accomplished novel to date.

Marjorie Hunt presents the lives and careers of two Italian American master stone carvers, Roger Morigi and Vincent Palumbo, who have spent decades creating the sculptural works, such as gargoyles, grotesques, capitals, pinnacles, saints, and angels that embellish Washington National Cathedral. Exploring the carvers' underlying aesthetic attitudes, Hunt reveals the spirit of creativity and mastery that infuses their work. The book records the stone-carving process, highlighting the carvers' complex body of technical knowledge—their opinions of various stones, their preferred tools for different stages of carving, and their techniques for achieving effects of light and shadow.

The Art of Letter Carving in Stone portrays the beauty of this age-old craft alongside practical instruction. Written by an eminent practitioner and teacher, it guides the novice through the basics of letter carving, drawn lettering and making simple designs, and for the more experienced it explains a new proportioning system for classical Roman capitals and demonstrates a useful approach to designing letterform variations.Topics include: the development of twentieth-century letter carving; detailed instruction for V-incising the key strokes of letters; tools, materials, stone and making a letter carving easel; drawing a range of alphabets for use in letter carving; making inscriptions, gilding and painting letters, and simple fixings for inscriptions; designing headstones and plaques, house names, alphabets and poetry texts. This beautiful book illustrates a wide range of exciting and creative pieces, and celebrates the inspiring work of contemporary letter carvers. Superbly illustrated with 380 colour photographs and diagrams.

The sheer number of unfinished stone monuments in India is staggering and examples appear at some of India's most famous and well-studied sites that include rock-cut Ellora, Ajanta, and Mamallapuram. Unfinished work also appears on built temples celebrated for the intricacy of their sculpted decoration, such as those in Hoysala kingdom or in Orissa. This detailed study provides an overall coverage of India's unfinished work while addressing a range of issues related to stone-carving by examining a select number of monuments at specific sites. Instead of focusing on a site in its entirety, the study here focuses on specific issues of consequence in the context of unfinished work, as they gain an added weight and significance through discovery of their repetitive occurrence at site after site. At the heart of this book are the many varieties of unfinished stone carving that merit close observation to see what is there and what is not, and to appreciate that all the finished work has been through these various stages of being unfinished before reaching completion.

Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel weaves two parallel stories, one set in contemporary Toronto and Prince Edward County, Ontario, the other in the nineteenth century on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. Sylvia Bradley was rescued from her parents’ house by a doctor attracted to and challenged by her withdrawn ways. Their subsequent marriage has nourished her, but ultimately her husband’s care has formed a kind of prison. When she meets Andrew Woodman, a historical geographer, her world changes. A year after Andrew’s death, Sylvia makes an unlikely connection with Jerome McNaughton, a young Toronto artist whose discovery of Andrew’s body on a small island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River unlocks a secret in his own past. After Sylvia finds Jerome in Toronto, she shares with him the story of her unusual childhood and of her devastating and ecstatic affair with Andrew, a man whose life was irrevocably affected by the decisions of the past. At the breathtaking centre of the novel is the compelling tale of Andrew’s forebears. We meet his great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodman, whose ambitions brought him from England to the northeastern shores of Lake Ontario, during the days of the flourishing timber and shipbuilding industries; Joseph’s practical, independent and isolated daughter, Annabel; and his son, Branwell, an innkeeper and a painter. It is Branwell’s eventual liaison with an orphaned French-Canadian woman that begins the family’s new generation and sets the stage for future events. A novel about loss and the transitory nature of place, A Map of Glass is vivid with evocative prose and haunting imagery—a lake of light on a wooden table; a hotel gradually buried by sand; a fully clothed man frozen in an iceberg; a blind woman tracing her fingers over a tactile map. Containing all of the elements for which Jane Urquhart’s writing is celebrated, it stands as her richest, most accomplished novel to date.