In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart's brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed.

Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm—the "great wind" that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children's ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter.

Emer's tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother's entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother's dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.

In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time. (From McClelland & Stewart)

In Winter I Get Up at Night was on the longlist for the 2024 Giller Prize

Jane Urquhart is a novelist and poet. In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Urquhart has written seven critically acclaimed novels. In 1994, she received the Marian Engel Award, now known as Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. Her debut The Whirlpool received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France. The 1993 speculative fiction novel Away won the Trillium Award, was a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a contender in Canada Reads 2013, when it was defended by Charlotte Gray.
She received the Governor General's Literary Award in 1997 for The Underpainter. The novel was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The Stone Carvers was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, as well the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2001 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She has also authored four poetry books and a short story collection entitled A Number of Things.