SOURCE: A review of Away, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 143-44.

In the following, Hewson offers a highly favorable assessment of Away, noting Urquahart's focus on story and voice.

The title of Jane Urquhart's third novel [Away] is not just a reference to Mary, an intriguing character who, on a remote island off the northern coast of Ireland, gets taken by a daemon lover, renamed, and claimed by the "other-world." Rather, the condition of being "away" resonates as a metaphor, reminding us how a writer must feel when she is writing or a reader when she is engaged by fiction, unwilling or unable to leave completely the world of the book, its entrancing geography interrupting the mundane here and now; or how one functions when overcome by passion for another, drifting, as if spellbound, in a dreamlike fog. Urquhart has always been superb at rendering...