Press Clippings

The Sea Captain’s Wife by Beth Powning begins in 1861, at Whelan’s Cove – a fictional town – near Saint John, New Brunswick. The Bradstock family are ship builder’s; the eldest son, Nathaniel, captain of the schooner Traveller. The sea captain’s wife is Azuba. We meet Azuba as she is recovering from a miscarriage – she became pregnant the last time her husband was home – he is away again now and will not be back for some months. This is the life of a sea captain’s wife, long absences while her husband is at sea. Nathaniel and Azuba’s daughter, Carrie, did not meet her father until she was three years old.

Click here to read the full review on Cottage Country Now.

For travellers, virtual and actual, The Sea Captain's Wife offers a fine and variegated journey: back in time (to the 1860s) and around the world on a merchant sailing ship.

Azuba Galloway Bradstock, the book's protagonist, born and raised in coastal New Brunswick, within sight, sound and scent of the sea, loves her town but yearns to see and know the wider world.

Click here to read the full review on the Globe and Mail

BY VERONICA ROSS

 

Stories about the past can be so much more interesting than tales of the present day. The present is still formless. Who know what will happen tomorrow, how things will turn out in the mysterious future?

But much is known about the past. All those details always seem exotic to me — like the celery "vases" that grace the dining room table at Woodside National Historic Site in Kitchener and the lovely dishes and old piano in the parlour. These artifacts cast a patina over what can only be imagined about the lives lived there (Sunday afternoon ennui, the women suffering from their corsets and so on).

Click Here to read full review on Guelph Mercury Review, or use the download link below.

Settled in and surrounded by the inspiration of New Brunswick’s beauty – Beth Powning lives, breaths and creates.  Be it through the lense of her camera or her words on paper Powning has found the perfect muse…home

Click here to read the full article on Sea and be Scene.
Or use the download link below for a PDF. 

I am Planta: On the Line. This is THECOMMENTARY.CA.

The Sea Captain’s Wife is a new book from Beth Powning. It’s described as a gripping novel of love and obsession set on the high seas of the 1860’s. It takes us from the Bay of Fundy, where Azuba Galloway was born and where she often dreams of seeing the world. She marries a captain, but she can’t see the world as she’d like. Beth Powning is the author of The Hatbox Letters, Edge Seasons, and Shadow Child.

Click here to read the post on thecommentary.ca

Sometimes, I see life as a giant connect-the-dot puzzle, our seemingly random conversations solid enough on their own, but much more interesting when they are connected line by line, giving us a bigger picture, a grander narrative.

This is such a story. It begins with a conversation and ends with a whole book.

About a month ago, I was in a Toronto meeting that was interrupted by one of the few things that can truly derail a business agenda -- death.

In this case, the death of an infant; a still-born child.

Click here  to read the full article on the Times and Transcript

New Brunswick author Beth Powning was born into a literary world. Her grandfather, a professor of Victorian Literature at Brown University, always read poetry at family gatherings. There were a number of famous authors in her small New England town. Some were family friends. The young Powning would have tea with children’s book author Esther Bates.

Click here to read the full article on the Toronto Star

 

New Brunswick's Beth Powning lets her imagination run away from her in The Sea Captain's Wife. This turns out to be just fine, as we lucky readers get to go along for the voyage.

It's highbrow Harlequin meets high-seas adventure. Powning gussies up both forms: Rather than typical "boy-meet girl" romance, her love story anatomizes a struggling young marriage; rather than a salty sailor, this ocean epic recounts the escapades of a sea-faring wife.

Click Here to read the full article on the Toronto Star

Readers will find a streak of the poetic in all of Beth Powning's work, including her new novel, The Sea Captain's Wife. As in her two wonderfully wrought memoirs, Edge Seasons and Shadow Child and in her widely lauded first novel, The Hatbox Letters, the New Brunswick writer proves a master of descriptive dexterity. Her keen eye for landscape and for detail give her work a rewarding resonance.

 Click here to read the full article on the London Free Press

The daughter of a ship builder, Azuba Galloway grows up in a small town on the Bay of Fundy watching ships go out to sea. Studying the captains as they lead their wives and children on board, she fantasizes about their endless adventures in foreign ports.

Some day, the young Azuba tells herself, that will be me, sailing around the world with my husband and family. When she falls in love, at 19, it's with 28-year-old Nathaniel Bradstock, the youngest of three sea-captain brothers. Nathaniel shares Azuba's dream of a shipboard marriage. That is, he does until he sees his wedding present from his new father-in-law: a veritable palace where Azuba can live comfortably with a houseful of children while her husband is tending to his trade.

Click here to read full article on the Edmonton Journal