TORONTO - Jane Urquhart always wanted to write a book about the bond between cousins.
Growing up with brothers, the author says she formed close ties with her gang of young female relatives.
"It's like a sibling relationship in some sense, but on the other hand, it's also like a friendship," Urquhart said during a recent telephone interview from her home near Brighton, Ont.
"It's a lovely kind of transitional area that cousins occupy. They're closer in a way than any friends can be because you have a shared history."
That special relationship is at the centre of Urquhart's new novel "Sanctuary Line."
The book tells the story of Liz Crane, an entomologist who moves back to her family's rural Ontario farmhouse on the shores of Lake Erie to observe the migratory patterns of the Monarch butterfly.
As she mourns the recent death of her cousin Amanda — a military strategist killed in Afghanistan — Liz casts her mind back to summers past, ruminating on her childhood, family history and a long-ago romance with the young son of a Mexican farm labourer.
A complicated — and contradictory — portrait of Amanda slowly emerges through the window of Liz's memory. Staunchly committed to her career, Mandy (as Liz calls her) was also stubbornly embroiled in a furtive love affair with a mysterious "superior officer" and had a penchant for poetry.
Urquhart, 61, says the idea for the character was partly inspired from frequent lectures the author has given at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont.
"I am never anything less than staggered by the intellectual activity that goes on around that place in the officer training program," she says.
"I must say I was also ... surprised. One doesn't really think of young officers in training as being interested in literature or as being people who would be, for example, fascinated by poetry. But they are, and, in fact, probably the most interesting discussions that I've had with post-secondary students about my work have taken place at the Royal Military College."
The novel richly conveys the summer days that Amanda and Liz spent on the farm with family members and suggests that such kinship is fast becoming a thing of the past.
"The amount of migration is huge, even within our own country," says Urquhart, whose 2001 novel "The Stone Carvers" was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
"You may be educated in Ontario, you may have been born in Ontario, your job may eventually be in British Columbia. Previous generations didn't move around to that extent. Now it's almost taken for granted that the likelihood of an extended family all being in the same vicinity is pretty slim."
Urquhart wrote some of "Sanctuary Line" in Ireland, where she has a small place with limited access to email.
The author says the novel took a "long time" to write, with breaks to pen a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery and compile a Canadian anthology of short stories.
Much has changed in the five years since Urquhart's last novel — "A Map of Glass" — was published. E-readers have stormed the publishing world, but Urquhart insists she won't be getting on the bandwagon herself.
"I think I'm probably too old for that," she says.
"It's the first time I've said I'm too old for anything — isn't that awful? ... I am a great lover of the book object. While ... I don't care how people read ... I don't see it working for me."
She is, however, looking forward to an upcoming book tour to promote "Sanctuary Line," saying she finds it "gratifying to the nth-degree" to meet her fans.
"Here's someone who's shared your experience, has taken the time to sit down with you and read every line you have written between two covers," she says.
"They come to you with your book in their mind and it's a relationship that's almost impossible to describe."