Jane Urquhart

The memoir of an aging painter who spent his life hoarding other people's experiences which he absorbed into his art, but never gave anything in return, even to the woman who loved him. Heart of granite, or fear of happiness? He himself is unable to decide.

Set in present-day Toronto and in the 19th-century world of rural Ontario timber barons, it opens with the wintry death of Alzheimer's sufferer Andrew, whose body, borne by an ice floe, runs aground on the small Lake Ontario island where artist Jerome McNaughton is seeking inspiration. The story steps back a century, to when Andrew's ancestors, owners of the same island, razed forests to build ships, then it jumps forward a year from the opening scene...