When the world was still reeling from the staggering losses incurred in the First World War, an unknown sculptor was raising a colossal monument in France, where so many of his countrymen had fought and died. Unveiled in 1936, the Memorial at Vimy Ridge still stands as a stark reminder of the thousands of Canadians who gave their lives in France and as a testament to the vision and single-minded obsession of its architect, Walter Allward. Sweeping across three countries and two centuries, The Stone Carvers brings together two long-estranged siblings and a visionary nineteenth-century German priest with the story of the obsessive Walter Allward. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. Moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers and of two individuals whose lives are marked by obsession and transformed by art. Grasping her characters as few authors do, Jane Urquhart carves a radiant and enduring tale at once vivid, dark and redemptive.