|
Ann-Marie MacDonald & Beth Powning Reading
Ann-Marie MacDonald and Beth Powning will read, take questions, and sign books at
the Ted Daigle Auditorium in Room 101 of the Brian Mulroney Building at St Thomas University on Thursday September 16th
at 8pm, as part of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick's (WFNB) annual Alden Nowlan Literary Festival.
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a novelist, playwright and actor, and the author
of the acclaimed play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).
Her first novel, Fall On Your Knees,
became an international best-seller in 1996, published in 21 countries. Winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book
and numerous other literary awards, it also became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club.
MacDonald’s #1 National
Best-seller, The Way the Crow Flies, was short-listed for the Giller Prize and a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for Best Book. She was a finalist for the CBA Libris Author of the Year Award and the novel won the CBA Libris Fiction
Book of the Year Award.
Available in paperback from Vintage Canada, Maclean’s Magazine called it, “A mesmerising
recreation of a vanished era and a lost childhood…rendered with beauty and passion.”
In The Way the
Crow Flies, MacDonald takes us back to the early 1960s, a time of optimism infused with the excitement of the space race
and overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War, a world filtered through the imagination of Madeleine, a spirited eight-year-old.
Unaware that her father is caught up in his own web of secrets, she welcomes her family’s posting to a sleepy air force
base in Ontario. Then tragedy strikes, and a local murder intersects with global forces.
With her unerring eye for
the whimsical, the absurd and the quintessentially human, MacDonald evokes the pain, confusion and humour of childhood in
a perilous adult world.
Throughout her diverse career, New Brunswick’s Beth Powning
has always gone below the surface to reveal the great beauty and fragility of the world that surrounds her.
This fall,
Beth Powning debuts as a novelist with a work of remarkable power and maturity. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, The
Hatbox Letters is the moving story of one woman’s journey from grief to renewal as she discovers solace and purpose
in the ever-shifting layers of memory.
It has been over a year since the sudden death of her husband, and Kate Harding
is still reeling from the unbearable loss. She seems to be enduring her life rather than living it. With both of her children
grown and on their own, the sprawling Victorian house where every room reminds her of Tom overwhelms Kate.
Little
does she know, but the arrival of nine antique hatboxes will forever change what Kate has always believed about her family’s
past. The hatboxes delivered from the Connecticut home of Kate’s late grandparents are filled with letters, papers,
diaries and photographs.
As Kate works her way through the past, hatbox by hatbox, the letters reveal a remarkable
story of two people who come together under the most unexpected of circumstances. Within the boxes are lessons on the strength
and resiliency of the heart and spirit. They provide Kate with comfort and direction as she navigates her way back into the
world.
Rich and deeply resonant, The Hatbox Letters
is a novel about life’s joys and sorrows.
To access the complete schedule of events for the Alden Nowlan Literary
Festival please contact the WFNB at (506) 459-7228 or by email at wfnb@nb.aibn.com or visit their website at http://www.umce.ca/wfnb.
More Arts & Culture
|
