With Beth Powning’s trademark elegance and insight into the hearts and minds of unforgettable women, A Measure of Light brings to life an extraordinary historical figure.Mary Dyer is a seventeenth-century Puritan who flees persecution in England, only to find the colony of Massachusetts Bay as dangerous as the country she left behind. Though she is the wife of a successful merchant and mother to their children, she becomes stigmatized following a birth gone terribly wrong ...

Home is like a leaf on a tree: other people, other homes, are the other leaves. They live beneath the same sky, share the same memories, survive the same storms.But one leaf is a solitude.After twenty-five years on a New Brunswick farm, award-winning Canadian author Beth Powning came to understand the land she calls home. Now, almost twenty years after the initial publication of Home, readers may once again experience the spirit of home in nature in this n...

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

Growing up on the Bay of Fundy, Azuba Galloway dreams of going to sea. She watches magnificent ships slowly making their way into Whelan’s Cove, the sense of exoticism bursting from their holds along with foreign goods.As a young woman, Azuba marries a seasoned merchant sea captain, Nathaniel Bradstock. Unwilling to have him away at sea for most of their married life, and anxious to see far shores, she extracts a promise that he will take her with him. But Azuba becomes pregnant so...

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 bette...

National BestsellerLike many young women, Beth Powning faced decisions of whether and when to start a family. Ambivalence gave way to dreams for a baby, and at age twenty-four she became pregnant. But eleven days past her due date, she delivered a perfect, stillborn son. In this beautifully wrought exploration of motherhood and loss, the acclaimed New Brunswick writer takes us on a powerful journey into the heart of grief and renewal.

A gripping novel of love and adventure on the high seas that introduces an unforgettable young heroine.Growing up on the Bay of Fundy in the 1860s, Azuba Galloway is determined to escape the confines of her town and live at sea. When she captures the heart of Captain Nathaniel Bradstock, she is sure her dreams are about to be realized, only to have pregnancy intervene. But when Azuba becomes embroiled in a scandal, Nathaniel must bring his young family abroad to sa...

From the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of The Hatbox Letters and Shadow Child comes the story of a year of transformation.In the middle years of her life, Beth Powning stands on a threshold: an “edge season.” Late one August, when Beth and her partner, Peter, observe the deserted sauna bath on their farm near Sussex, New Brunswick, she remembers the faith and energy that went into building it. As they begin to repair the sauna, the project becomes a met...

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 roo...

Growing up on the Bay of Fundy, Azuba Galloway dreams of going to sea. She watches magnificent ships slowly making their way into Whelan’s Cove, the sense of exoticism bursting from their holds along with foreign goods.As a young woman, Azuba marries a seasoned merchant sea captain, Nathaniel Bradstock. Unwilling to have him away at sea for most of their married life, and anxious to see far shores, she extracts a promise that he will take her with him. But Azuba becomes pregnant so...

To satisfy her wandering feet, eighteen-year-old Gillian McAllister is sent from Ireland to Canada in the summer of 1932. She arrives with her Irish ways intact, determined not to let the wiles of crop duster Christian Hunter woo her into submission. Yet as the summer unfolds and the sweet taste of love grows, Gillian's appeal lures more than she anticipates, shattering the life they've built. Fourteen years, a Great Depression, and a World War later, Christian sets out to discover why Gil...

Set in Europe, in 1938, during the tense run-up to war, and perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd, Robert Harris, and Susan Elia MacNeal, this gripping historical novel features the half-British, half-German actress (and wholly covert spy) Clara Vine, who finds herself enmeshed in a dangerous game of subterfuge.The colorful, lively streets of Paris come as a welcome relief to Clara Vine after the dour countenance of Berlin, where bunkers and bomb sh...