num_pages: 368
description: In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him—his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter— in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination—is Jane Urquhart 's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.
language: English
title: The Underpainter
titlecomplete: The Underpainter
genres: Historical, Adult Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Canada, Fiction, Canadian Literature, Art
ratings_count: 2779
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Longlist, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Governor General's Literary Awards / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
publisher: Penguin Books