SOURCE: "Magically Real," in Books in Canada, Vol. XXII, No. 7, October, 1993, p. 44.

In the following, McNaughton offers praise for Away.

Jane Urquhart's Away is a complex layering of ideas about emotions and emotions about ideas. If that sounds too intellectual, Away is also one of those novels that moves in and takes over your life. Urquhart writes on a very large canvas, spanning more than a century and two continents. The book begins in pre-famine Northern Ireland, when beautiful young Mary pulls a drowning man from a sea awash with cabbages, silver teapots, and casks of whisky. The man dies in Mary's arms. Ever after he is regarded as Mary's demon lover and she is thought to be not of this world—"away."

The novel describes what happens to Mary and Brian, the sceptical, self-educated schoolteacher she marries, and to their children, Liam and Eileen. When the famine...