num_pages: 416
description: Set mainly in a remote area of County Kerry in the 40s and 50s Jane Urquharts stunning new novel is at once intimate and epic in scope. Tam an English woman in her thirties has been living in this harshly beautiful region since shortly after the war in which she served as an auxiliary pilot. She is now leaving her lover Niall who like his father before him is a meteorologist.The airliner she is travelling on becomes grounded by fog at Gander Airport Newfoundland. As she waits she regards an enigmatic mural and revisits not only the circumstances that brought her to Ireland but her intense relationship with Niall and his growing despondency over his younger brother Kierans disappearance years before.We learn of Kierans troubled childhood and the tragedy that caused him as a boy to be separated from home and taken in by a widowed countrywoman who lives in the mountains behind the town. He comes to know the local people among them a tailor a fisherman-teacher and a sheep farmer who is a great philosopher. There is also the jewellers daughter a young woman who will come to change the course of several lives.Running parallel is the story of Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead and how he created the mural that is Tams only companion through three long days and nights. An elegiac novel of emotional depth that vividly evokes a time and a place The Night Stages explores the meaning of separation the sorrows of fractured families and the profound effect of home in a world where a way of life is changing. It is Jane Urquharts richest most rewarding novel to date.
language: English
title: The Night Stages
publisher: McClelland & Stewart