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From Amazon
Devotees of Emily Brontë will love Changing Heaven, Jane Urquhart's magical novel about the pitfalls of obsessive love, single-minded passion, and tumultuous weather. The book alternates between two narratives, one focusing on Arianna Ether, a turn-of-the-century balloonist/parachutist who perishes in a failed stunt on the English moors and comes to haunt the region with the ghost of Emily Brontë. The second storyline focuses on lonely Ann, an obsessed modern-day Brontë scholar writing a book about the use of weather in Wuthering Heights. When she meets Arthur, who is equally obsessed with the Italian artist Tintoretto, the two become entwined in a destructive love affair, à la Catherine and Heathcliff, dragging them both to despair. Not surprisingly, weather plays a major role in the novel, mirroring the intensity of the characters' emotions: "She would lie beneath the wheels of a thousand freight trains for twenty minutes of this pleasure, this troubled storm of blindness and forgetting. His mouth, silent now, draws her toward him, his body cracks her open and certainly there is lightning and thunder, the tempest she has always wanted, the hurricane: its power, its devastation." Urquhart's imaginative plot is captivating, and her lyrical prose persuasively conjures up the wild weather of the moors and of the heart, leaving the reader invigorated by the experience. --Leah Eichler
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