No Wrong Seasons will be available September 30th, 2025.
You can order online through: Inanna Publications at: https://inanna.ca or through Amazon or Indigo, or visit your local independent bookstore.
My debut novel, No Wrong Seasons, is told in four voices and explores the redemptive powers of art, nature, and community.
The story is set in a lakeside community in Southern Quebec, where it is possible to hide, and at the same time, where nothing is hidden.
Following a rupture in his friendship with K, his best friend since childhood, Dieter, a seventeen-year-old photographer, seeks solace and inspiration in the forest. Wandering deep into the woods, he discovers a dilapidated cabin filled with works of art. This leads to a relationship with Hazel, a reclusive visual artist, who becomes his mentor. When K is institutionalized by her parents following a suicide attempt, Dieter embarks on a mission to seek answers. When her situation worsens, Dieter confides his fears to his mentor. Hazel intuits echoes of her own traumatic past in K’s story, and is propelled to leave the comfort of her bitterness and find redemption in action.
Excerpt from
No Wrong Seasons
When he stumbles across it, while zooming in on the burl of a crooked tree, he thinks it’s a hunting camp. The structure lists to the left, leaning into the leaf mold, and thick moss covers the roof. Wild blackberry brambles, which are prolific here, hug the board and batten walls; the windows are coated with grime.
His pulse quickens as he enters. Birdsong and shafts of sunlight spill through the open door and across well-worn boards. Huge canvases shout colour from the walls. Reds explode. Oranges and yellows crackle like the flames of Pentecost in his old Sunday school reader.
He sinks to the floor in a squat. From this perspective, the paintings tower over him, the blues speak of night skies and the greens echo the trees outside, the blue green of the columbine leaf, silence.
It feels like church. Only better than the one his grandfather drags him to each Sunday. He cases the room. Dead leaves litter the floor. Humus is the incense here, a complex aroma of the life cycle.
Dieter rises, wanting to touch the canvases. Should he? The phrase “trespass against others” comes to him, a snippet of prayer mouthed every Sunday at the Presbyterian services his grandfather insists they attend. Whose place is this? Whose imagination filled these walls? A genius or a madman? Both? A gust of wind hits the door and its hinges creak. Dieter skitters sideways, a muscle catching in his neck, gooseflesh prickling across his arms.
His gut is telling him to get out, get out now, that this place is possessed. He bows his head, whispers “sorry,” and bolts, his pulse racing.
He slows when he reaches the paved road. That was weird. Was it real? An apparition? It felt too beautiful to be real, he thinks. I should have taken photos to prove the place wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
A mystery. Here, on the outskirts of this dull town. Dieter knows he’ll have to return. Next time he won’t be such a wuss. Next time he’ll capture it all on film, build a photo essay. Maybe some magazine would run it. He can imagine the buzz: Teenage Boy Finds Lost Masterpieces Hidden in Shack. This could be his big break.
Book Launch
No Wrong Seasons Launch Party
Sunday October 19th, 2-4 p.m.
at Uplands Museum
& Cultural Centre
9, rue Speid, Sherbrooke (Québec) J1M 1R9
819 564-0409
All are welcome.
Books will be for sale on site.
Light refreshments will be served.
Brenda Hartwell’s debut novel is a unique and deeply moving story of friendship across generational divides. Though it wrestles with themes of suicide, mental health, racism and sexual violence against women, No Wrong Seasons is ultimately a story of compassion, hope and the restorative power of art.
-Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt, author of Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle East Memoir (Thistledown Press)
They call her Witch Hazel. Obsessed with her artwork and angry at the world, Hazel doesn’t mind her outsider status, until a lonely teenager stumbles upon her cabin in the woods. At times, Dieter and Hazel are like "two feral animals blinking at each other through dense foliage" but they forge a bond, changing the course of each other's lives and joining forces to take care of someone who is still more vulnerable. Brenda Hartwell presents the inner lives of her characters with pitch-perfect compassion in this polyvocal novel. At once lyrical, compelling and wise, No Wrong Seasons is a testament to intergenerational friendship, and a reminder that we never get to stop creating, learning, and fighting for what’s right.
-Maria Meindl, author, The Work (Stonehouse Publishing)