Globe and Mail, August 21, 2004 - "...a deeply beautiful book... a stunning debut."

National Post, August 21, 2004 - "rich, atmospheric, textured and swift..."

Maclean’s, September 6, 2004 - "Powning’s central artistic concern...(is to) locate herself -- and her characters -- along the great chain of being...a remarkable portrait."

The Chronicle Herald, Halifax, Sept 5, 2004 - "..an ode to joy and a lamentation. Powning’s exquisite novel sings...brilliant."

Available in bookstores across Canada and on-line at Amazon.ca and IndigoChapters.ca

In this beautiful and deeply moving novel, a young widow struggles to come to terms with her solitary life in the rambling Victorian house she shared until recently with her husband and children in semi-rural New Brunswick. It is in this house, surrounded by heirloom gardens and the gentle sounds of a river, that Kate Harding, 52, faces her second winter since the untimely death of her husband. Her children, now grown, are living away, and Kate is truly on her own. In her living room are several hatboxes filled with letters and other ghostly ephemera, recently brought by her sister from the attic of their grandparents’ 18th-century Connecticut house. Their sweet mustiness tinges the air and makes Kate dream of her childhood and of her beloved grandparents. She remembers the sense of permanence and refuge that she felt in their apple-scented world, as well as, more recently, with her husband. As she begins to read the hatbox letters, she discovers that what to a child seemed a serene and blissful marriage was in fact founded on a tragic event. As Kate’s eyes clear to the truth of the past, a new tragedy unfolds, and her own house, filled with the shared detritus of marriage and motherhood, becomes the refuge where Kate can connect the strands of her unravelled life. In The Hatbox Letters — which is both sad and exhilarating, touching and illuminating — Beth Powning offers readers an unforgettable story of love, grief and renewal, both past and present, as well as her extraordinary perceptions of the natural world.

Excerpt from The Hatbox Letters, Knopf Canada, by Beth Powning:

Chapter One - Kate

Kate leans in the doorway of the living room, arms crossed, the sleeves of a cotton sweater shoved to her elbows. Her forearms are sinewy - brown, dry-skinned, thorn-scratched. She wears two silver bracelets and a thick gold wedding band. Some women, she realized, remove their rings.
In the corner is a stack of nine antique hatboxes. She has not touched them since they were set down a week ago, delivered by her sister, who drove them up from Hartford. They are oval or round, some tied with string, some decorated with maroon-and-silver stripes, others printed with gothic landscapes-- willows, mountains, ruined castles. Their smell has begun to permeate the room even though the windows are open. It is the smell of her grandparent’s attic, a smell she has not forgotten but thought had vanished, like the past itself. That it has not and is still here, this aroma of horshair and leather, of apples and musty quilts, of old dresses and satin ribbons-- that this smell still exists here in this Canadian river valley, six hundred miles north of her grandparents’ house, is disquieting. It awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.
The arrival of the hatboxes is untimely, since dispossession, like grief, is an act of which Kate has had her fill since Tom’s death a year and three months ago, from a heart attack at age fifty-two. She’s hauled garbage bags of clothes, like lumpy corpses, down to the washing machine, unable to give away anything that might bear his painty, sawdusty smell. Sorting through the clothes, she was relieved whenever she came across T-shirts like Swiss cheese or underpants held by threads to waistbands no longer elastic. Choices made easy: Okay, throw this away. No one in her family has wanted to face making such decisions about the papers in these hatboxes. They have been lugged from place to place, from barn to basement to closet, ever since the big house in whose attic they’d accumulated for five generations was sold.

UPCOMING EVENTS:
September 16, 2004
8 PM, Ted Daigle Auditorium, Edmund Casey Hall, St. Thomas University
Reading with Ann-Marie Macdonald
September 17, 2004
7:30 PM
Halifax Grammar School, 945 Tower Road
Reading with Ann-Marie Macdonald
In September/October:
Appearances at Ottawa International Writer’s Festival, Ottawa; Wordfest, Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival; Vancouver International Writers Festival.

Thursday, September 30
 
Toronto – 7:30 p.m.                    University of Toronto
                                                Hart House, Music Room
                                                7 Hart House Circle, second floor
                                                (Sponsored by the U of T Bookstore. For more information, please contact
                                                (416) 978-7908.)
 
Friday, October 1
 
Waterloo – 7:30 p.m.                  Knox Presbyterian Church
                                                50 Erb St.
                                                Waterloo, Ontario
                                                (Sponsored by Words Worth Books. For more information, please contact
                                                (519) 884-2665.
 
 
Saturday, October 2
 
Burlington – 7:00 p.m.                Royal Botanical Gardens
                                                Burlington, Ontario
                                                (Sponsored by A Different Drummer Books. For more information, please contact
                                                (905) 639-0925

November 26, Lorenzo Society Reading Series, 7 PM, Faculty-Staff Club, Ward Chipman Library, Saint John, NB

Author sitting on the many drafts for The Hatbox Letters