Away

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This historical novel of extraordinary power and insight compellingly
portrays four generations of Irish and their Canadian descendants over a
150-year period.

The focus is on the first two generations: schoolmaster Brian
O’Malley; his reputedly bewitched wife, Mary; and their two children,
Eileen and Liam. Liam becomes a first-generation Irish Canadian, farming
in the Madoc–Port Hope area of southern Ontario. As Liam’s adopted
daughter, Eileen’s illegitimate child Deirdre becomes the grandmother
of Esther O’Malley Robertson, “the last and the most subdued of the
extreme women”; the one who remains, as the story opens, in the
family’s 19th-century house, which is about to be destroyed by
creeping industrialism.

Away is remarkable for its language and for its dramatization of two
distinct times and places—that of the starving peasant–farmers of
Ireland during the potato blight of the 1840s, and that of the pioneer
Ontario homesteaders in the mid-19th century. Rarely have they been
portrayed more vividly.

This exceptional novel merges Urquhart’s gift for narrative,
characterization, and lyrical prose with her ability to use myth and
fantasy to convey the depths of human experience.