The Hatbox Letters A Novel [Paperback]

A luminescent debut novel following one woman's journey through love, loss, grief, and renewal

In her rambling Victorian house, surrounded by heirloom gardens and the gentle sounds of a river, fifty-two-year-old Kate Harding faces her second winter since the untimely death of her husband. In her living room are several hatboxes filled with letters recently brought by her sister from the attic of their grandparents' eighteenth-century Connecticut house. Kate remembers the sense of permanence and refuge that she felt in her grandparents' 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 unraveled life.

Praise forThe Hatbox Letters

Powning brilliantly illuminates grief in all its shape-shifting pain, and in so doing, expands her characters' lives, and ours...a deeply beautiful book...an extraordinary achievement.
-The Globe and Mail

Tender and lush. . . . Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right.
-National Post

Powning's subject here is no less than the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigor and grace.
-Quill & Quire

Praise forHome: Chronicle of a North Country Life

A beautiful celebration of natural life. . . .
- E. L. Doctorow

In a world increasingly cynical and numb, Powning puts a light in the window for us all. . . . -Chicago Tribune

Powning combines an extraordinary understanding and sense of place with an affinity for the world of nature...this book imparts a feeling of lB