The Stone Carvers Hardcover - 2001

Media reviews

“The Great Canadian Novel.…An epic portrait of a nation’s birth.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“Breathtaking. By the end of the book, Urquhart’s message about the inexorable human need to remember seems almost set in stone.”
–Time

“Magnificent.…A spellbinding tale.…”
–Independent (U.K.)

“This book is not just delightful, but essential.…Extraordinarily rewarding.”
–Globe and Mail

“Triumphant.…”
The Observer (U.K.)

“Sculptors are like lovers in this saga, awakening rock instead of flesh.…Urquhart powerfully evokes the wonders of stone and the carver’s art, always linking them to the human body.…The novel’s moving promise [is] that, if we are true to our gifts, we can at least strike a brief form from the obdurate stone of our fate.”
–Maclean's

“Superb.…Urquhart clusters together momentous philosophical sentiments on such issues as aesthetics, mortality and memory in an epic prose that sweeps as far and wide as the Canadian geography.… She is a gifted storyteller.…[She] also writes of the most heart-rending ironies that have become part of our collective past.…Ultimately, Urquhart’s story, which is at once a romance drama, war epic and trail-blazing story of pioneers, speaks of the small actions – like the minute movements that make up the stone cutter’s craft – taken by individuals in the past that make our own future possible.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“[Urquhart] has a mesmerizing ability to animate the past, calling up events and eras with extraordinary clarity and imbuing them with wonder and marvel.”
–Quill & Quire

“The Stone Carvers has the immediacy and wisdom of a folk tale.…Urquhart renders the texture and colour of such objects so vividly that they stick in the mind the way memories from early childhood do.…For sheer exuberance of style, The Stone Carvers recalls the riotous paintings of Marc Chagall in which human figures, wearing expressions of calm delight, soar over villages. Although people don’t defy gravity in The Stone Carvers, miracles do appear.… [The Stone Carvers] offers total enchantment.”
–National Post

“A story with its own strong momentum, and undoubted emotional power.…”
–Toronto Star