Title: Wending
Author: Bel Hawley
Publication Date: 23 June 2025
Category: Verse Novel
Paperback: (203mm x 133mm)
ISBN
Print: 978-1-7636892-1-3
Ebook: 978-1-7636892-2-0

Wending follows a newly widowed woman who is sent to a river so remote it has no official name. In the mostly uninhabitable terrain, she survives, through her work and in her hope of returning home, but as time moves on, her erratic behaviour pushes her to further extremes. She begins to see a woman in her peripheral.

In a text where form reflects the single focus of a woman as she casts away her old life to follow a path to its bitter end, the outcast female accepts ostracisation and challenges narrative and social norms.

Wending is a story of widowhood, a novella in verse, a metaphoric shedding of skin.

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‘’Belinda Hawley’s Wending plumbs waters that are both unnervingly still and unfathomably deep. With clean spare lyricism, this meditative tale of widowhood and isolation drew me along its indistinct paths, lured me into its chasms, floated me on its watery rhythms – before returning me to the hard ungiving terrain that is grief. ‘
– Edwina Preston, author of Bad Art Mother

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Writing with a tangible physicality about the isolating experience of grief, Bel Hawley creates a rich and evocative frontline of wilderness to reflect a woman working and journeying through an abandoned landscape. The verse is extraordinarily visceral and profoundly moving. I discovered myself shedding tears.’
– Susan Francis, author of The Love that Remains

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