"In a country that barely remembers its prime ministers, it's hardly surprising that one of CanLit's brightest early stars is almost forgotten. But Cormorant Books' reprint of the 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven should bring back to prominence the extraordinary Gwethalyn Graham, who published two novels in her short life (1913 to 1965) and won the Governor General's award for both. Set against the opening years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven is a blistering attack on bigotry. It turns on the intense psychological conflict that erupts between father and daughter after the Westmount WASP woman falls in love with a Jew from an Ontario mining town. (The plot was drawn directly from Graham's own unhappy life: after two failed marriages, her love affair with a Jewish man was derailed when Graham's father refused to meet him.) The novel was an international success, translated into 18 languages and topping American bestseller lists." --Macleans, August 16 2004

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“Earth and High Heaven deserves to be read and discussed with other classic Canadian novels.”
— The Canadian Jewish News

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“Earth and High Heaven is a powerful testament against prejudice that is more telling for the time in which it was written.”
— Victoria Times Colonist

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“It’s a great read.”
— The Globe and Mail

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"Despite her political agenda, Graham knows enough to let her characters lead the way."

"Graham deftly avoids the simplistic duality of victim and oppressor. Although initally she sets up her characters as straw figures - Erica the WASP, Marc the Jew, Rene the French - she is adept at inner contradictions and complexities."

"Formally, Earth and High Heaven is a romantic comedy, with the lovers facing plenty of obstacles, including Erica's anti-Semitic father and host of seemingly insurmountable prejudices. Scratch the comedic surface, however, and serious issues show through."

"It's startling and chastening to read of women in the 1940s who seem as liberated as any woman today."

— Claire Rothman, The Montreal Gazette, March 13, 2004

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"...there is a surprising honesty (if not subtlety) to Graham's vision, and the story is undeniably compelling in the simplest sense: It's a great read."

"The novel's reappearance is fortuitous. As in 1942, public rhetoric in Canada has lately been delighting in the pleasures of comparison; it's tempting, now as then, to rest on what suddenly looks like the moral high ground and save our criticism for the blatant trespasses committed elsewhere. We oughtn't to need Gwethalyn Graham to point out Canadian hypocrisy, but Earth and High Heaven is useful context at the very least, and has been absent from view for too long."

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Gwethalyn Graham's name doesn't ring many bells these days. Nearly forgotten and largely written out of our literary history, the Toronto-born writer created a sensation in Canada and the United States during World War II by daring to write about a topic that made everyone uncomfortable. Her novel Earth And High Heaven, published in 1944, when its author was just 31, ripped the veil off Canada's genteel anti-semitism with its story of a young woman from an upper crust Anglo family in Westmount who falls in love with a Jewish lawyer her father forbids her to marry.

— Judy Stoffman, The Toronto Star Mar 6 / 04

Read the complete article here.