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.

At the age of fifty-two, Kate Harding has hit a crossroads: the pain that overwhelmed her when her husband died suddenly from a heart attack the previous year hasn’t diminished, and she is at a loss as to how to go on with her life. Living alone in her large Victorian house, its emptiness magnified by memories of better days, Kate can only dream of a time when her grief will abate, at least enough to allow her to hope for change.

When Kate’s sister drops off nine antique hatboxes of papers recovered from Shepton, their grandparents’ eighteenth-century home in Connecticut, Kate isn’t sure she is ready to face the remnants of her family’s past. She’s having enough trouble going through Tom’s things. Soon, though, the smell of the hatboxes — of her grandparents’ musty attic, of old quilts and satin ribbons — begins to permeate the air in her home and “awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.” As she slowly sorts through the letters, diaries and photographs, Kate begins to find some solace in the past, in her childhood memories of Shepton when every home was a comfort, every relationship untinged by pain. But the further she delves into her grandparents’ history, the more Kate realizes that her perfect world had its own dark side — an undercurrent of tragedy, personal loss and eternal grief.

Then an old acquaintance moves back to New Brunswick, and Kate begins to edge out of her solitude, surprising herself by accepting his invitation to dinner. Gregory and his wife were friends with Tom and Kate when the kids were young, a time of camping trips and days at the beach. But Gregory, now divorced, is also carrying the weight of grief, from the suicide of his son many years earlier. At first, Gregory represents a chance for Kate to capture some of the simple joy of her past, but when she realizes that Gregory is still living in it, his memories and pain warped into self-destructive anger, she knows she has to back away. And when Gregory’s determination to return to the way things were proves unshakeable, a new tragedy forces Kate to begin picking up the pieces of her shattered life.

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“The imagery is evocative and clear, and the feelings of love and loss are transmitted effectively and elegantly. The Hatbox Letters conveys a sense of wonder and wisdom.”
—The Vancouver Sun

“[A] novel of stunning beauty ... The Hatbox Letters is a moving elegy to things lost and found.”
—New Brunswick Reader

“Powning’s descriptions of gardens and birds rival any Audubon painting. The Hatbox Letters is not only an absorbing literary experience, but an exquisite visual experience as well.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

“The writing is highly sensual, painterly even, vividly portraying the natural world and its changing seasons.… [T]he depth of detail feels appropriate, mirroring the deliberate pace of Kate’s recovery and regeneration. Powning’s subject here is no less than the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigour and grace.”
—Quill & Quire

“Beth Powning reminds us of the essential links and threads that bind family and loved ones, past generations to future. In gentle prose, she illuminates passages through grief, yet the novel is studded with vitality. A story of unexpected endings and new beginnings — of life surging forward.”
—Frances Itani

“Like Annie Dillard, Beth Powning is a keen observer of the natural world. In language both erotic and exact, she explores the conflicting emotions of love and loss in a novel redolent with memory and the truth of experience, hard won.”
—Joan Clark

“Beth Powning’s language is lush with stunning images that linger long after the reading experience — and with soothing insights, especially of the healing potency available in family histories and connections with friends. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the landmines of grief. We can trust her: she knows the way back to the safety of emerging hope and belief in renewal.”
—Marjorie Anderson, co-editor, Dropped Threads

Praise for Shadow Child and Seeds of Another Summer
“Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her ‘apprenticeship in love and loss’, a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through.”
—Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War

“Beth Powning’s. . .pure, powerful prose lure us into [its] embrace, laying bare our desire for a union with the natural world. This is the work of a gifted artist.”
—Courtney Milne, author of Prairie Skies

“One of the most appealing novels to be published in Canada in the last decade. . . . Beautifully written and emotionally wise, this is a debut novel with a difference. Its melding of past and present in the life of its protagonist is so well woven it will prove a boon to readers with a taste for fiction and non-fiction alike. . . . Rich, elegiac and full of resonance, her novel is more than impressive. It is a winner.”
—The London Free Press

“Beth Powning’s extraordinary new novel, The Hatbox Letters, is both an ode to joy and a lamentation.”
—The Chronicle Herald

“Powning’s exquisite novel sings. . . . [She] has created a novel as brilliant as the light towards which it reaches.” —The Chronicle Herald

“There is an elegiac quality to Beth Powning’s writing, derived from her immersion in the rhythms of the natural world. . . . Few writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it’s lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself–and her characters–along the great chain of being.”
—Maclean’s

“The Hatbox Letters will appeal to anyone who enjoyed the charming correspondence in Richard B. Wright’s recent literary bestseller Clara Callan. But Powning’s novel features a sincerity that Wright’s narrative never quite musters. The Hatbox Letters is sure to win accolades in CanLit circles and [with] regular readers alike.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“The narrative of The Hatbox Letters is as warm and vivid as actually sitting next to the wood stove of Kate’s Maritime kitchen. Powning also has a knack for imagery that drops the reader firmly into the musty comfort of a Connecticut summer home in the early part of the 20th century. Other authors bring us close to historical periods; Powning puts us there.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right. She shows how grief can become more acute with the passing of time, rather than less painful as one might expect, and how its constricting grip can slowly paralyze the person left behind.”
—Lisa Moore, National Post

“While delineating the sere interior landscape of mourning, Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. A novel about death that makes you glad that you are alive, The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Powning is a superior writer, with startling powers of description.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

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In one interview, Beth Powning commented that in order to write fiction, “You have to be living in it; it’s almost happening to you as much as you’re making it.” In this sense, writing is inseparable from personal experience for the author, and it’s no surprise that many of the themes that run through Powning’s own life — the importance of home and family, love for the natural world, learning to live and create in spite of loss — become central themes in her writing. In the case of The Hatbox Letters, the parallels between Powning and her protagonist are many. Powning researched her own family history for this novel, reading letters and papers found in her family’s historical home in Connecticut, and even discovered an old box of her parents’ papers that included everything from piano lesson receipts to the death certificate for her grandfather’s sister, who died of measles at the age of eight. Such details provided the historical base for the story of Giles and Hetty at the heart of this novel. Just as Kate’s journey through the hatbox letters leads her to imagine the lives of her grandparents, Powning’s discoveries inspired her to honour her family’s history and the riches of her own life in fiction.

When The Hatbox Letters came out, Maclean’s reviewer Brian Bethune wrote, “Few Canadian writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it's lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself — and her characters — along the great chain of being.” Powning approaches her fiction the same way that she approaches her nature writing and nature photography, with the knowledge that our lives and our emotions are not separate from the world around us, whether the continuum of our family trees or how our gardens change from spring to fall. As Powning has described her writing process, “The way I write is I close my eyes and I sit and wait until I see the scene and know all the details. Which direction is the wind coming from? How cold is it? Is it snowing? Is the ground frozen, and if it is frozen, how far down? . . . I need to know these things.”

The Hatbox Letters is Beth Powning’s first novel, though she has been a writer for many years. Her previous books include Seeds of Another Summer: Finding the Spirit of Home in Nature (published as Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life in the United States), a collection of lyrical prose and photographs that celebrates the power and natural beauty of her New Brunswick home, and Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss, a memoir in which the author attempts to come to terms with the stillbirth of her first son. Powning has also been published extensively in periodicals such as Prism, Quarry and Fiddlehead, and is well known for her nature photography. The Hatbox Letters was a national bestseller in Canada and has also been published in the United States.

Beth Powning lives in an 1870 farmhouse with extensive gardens in Sussex, New Brunswick, with her husband, artist Peter Powning. Her next book, Edge Seasons, is a personal memoir about transformation — about seasonal change within the natural world around her and in her own life. It will be published in the fall of 2005.

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