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 Urquharts brilliant new novel, which Emer narrates, will leave the reader 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 childrens ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including, among others, a child performer who stars in a travelling circus, the daughter of Dukhobor community, the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three Nursing Sisters and two doctors, who the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter. Emers tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mothers entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher, her brothers 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, after Harpocrates, a Hellenistic God of secrecy and silence a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.
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