The Sister's Tale: A novel

Front Cover
Knopf Canada, May 25, 2021 - Fiction - 328 pages
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A novel of orphans and widows, terror and hope, and the relationships that hold us together when things fall apart.

With murder dominating the news, the respected wife of a New Brunswick sea captain is drawn into the case of a British home child whose bad luck has turned worse. Mortified that she must purchase the girl in a pauper auction to save her from the lechery of wealthy townsmen, Josephine Galloway finds herself suddenly the proprietor of a boarding house kept afloat by the sweat and tears of a curious and not completely compatible collection of women, including this English teenager, Flora Salford. Flora's place in her new "family" cannot be complete until she rescues the missing person in her life, the only one who understands the trials she has come through and fresh horrors met since they were separated years before.

Reconnecting with characters of Beth Powning's beloved The Sea Captain's Wife, The Sister's Tale is a story of women finding their way, together, through terrible circumstances they could neither predict nor avoid, but will stop at nothing to overcome.
 

Contents

Mouse Traps Duly Set
1
The Auction
11
Polite and Invisible
19
Ocracoke Island
40
Mirror
53
A Futile Fussiness
65
Emissaries of Winter
81
APRIL 1889
94
Fresh Bread and Freedom
192
Someone Elses Happiness
199
A Dark Ghost
222
Brass Duck
239
Like Beautiful Objects Like Possessions
256
Warning to Travellers
266
Reckonings
274
A Different Outcome
287

A Mans Kindness
128
Turrets and Gables
163
Enid
177
Afterword
305
Acknowledgements
311
Copyright

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About the author (2021)

BETH POWNING's previous books include the bestselling novels The Hatbox Letters, The Sea Captain's Wife, and most recently A Measure of Light, a Globe and Mail Best Book and winner of the inaugural New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction. Her works of memoir include Seeds of Another Summer: Finding the Spirit of Home in Nature, Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss, and Edge Seasons: A Mid-Life Year. In 2010, Beth was awarded New Brunswick's Lieutenant-Governor's Award for High Achievement in English-Language Literary Arts. She lives on a 300-acre farm near Sussex, New Brunswick, with her husband, the renowned sculptor Peter Powning.

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