Press Clippings

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

Whelan's Cove is a place of departures."

So begins Beth Powning's latest novel, The Sea Captain's Wife, a tale of the eternals of departures, relationships, and growth, revealed against the historical backdrop of the seagoing past of nineteenth century New Brunswick. The reader departs the present day, departs the New Brunswick in which we live, just as the titular character, Azuba, departs the life she knows, the Victorian New Brunswick familiar to her, to embark on her dramatic journey. And we, in turn, escape into her well-crafted world for a few hundred pages.

Click here to read the full review on the Telegraph Journal

YOU MIGHT NEVER guess that Sussex, N.B.-based writer and photographer Beth Powning was originally "from away."

Charming, genuine and forthright, the author of such critically acclaimed works as Shadow Child, Edge Seasons and The Hatbox Letters is quick with a colourful Maritimes anecdote when we meet for drinks at a Halifax hotel.

Click here to read full article on the Chronicle Herald.

New Brunswick's storied age of sail came alive Jan. 15 at the Sussex Legion as Beth Powning launched her new historical novel, The Sea Captain's Wife. More than 500 people attended, enjoying chowder, historical displays and nautical art that complemented the reading and book signing. The author, family and friends even donned period dress for an extra element of authenticity. Ahoy!

Click here to view article on the Telegraph Journal

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

The Sea Captain's Wife is the story of a New Brunswick woman's sojourn into uncharted waters. Beth Powning's latest novel is a herstory, a seafaring tale about a woman embracing her own worth, resuscitating her marriage and learning to navigate unforeseen storms.

 

Set in the 1860's, an era when women of a certain class were expected to dine on a steady diet of church, family, sewing circles and quilting bees, Azuba Bradstock is a woman in need of "nourishment for the mind and soul." She is the wife of a sea captain, a man 10 years her senior for whom "the world began at the harbour's mouth."

Azuba is an intelligent and resourceful heroine whose narrative voice carries Powning's latest book.

Click here to read full article on The Telegraph Journal

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

Maritime-based literary writer Beth Powning, author of the successful Hatbox Letters and the nature-themed memoirEdge Seasons, proves her versatility with her latest novel,The Sea Captain's Wife.

Part historical fiction, part love story and part tragedy, it is bound together by the strengths of Powning's signature nature writing.

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.

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