Author of quiet novels about memory, landscape, and the things left unsaid.
About
Margot Hale was born in 1952 in coastal Maine. She has published three novels with small independent presses. Her work has been described as “precise, luminous, and quietly devastating.” She lives in a small town in Vermont with two cats and a very old dog.
Books
The Observatory 1997
The Observatory
1997 • 218 pages
A widowed astronomer in rural New Hampshire records the slow disappearance of familiar constellations while her adult children return home for the first time in a decade.
Winter Letters 1995
Winter Letters
1995 • 184 pages
After the death of her sister, a woman finds a cache of unsent letters written over thirty years. She begins answering them herself.
The Silent Garden 1992
The Silent Garden
1992 • 201 pages
Two sisters maintain a formal garden on the edge of a failing estate. As the seasons turn, the garden reveals what they have refused to speak aloud.
Schedule • 1997
April 12 • Portland, ME Reading at Longfellow Books
7:30pm
May 3 • Boston, MA Conversation with the Boston Athenaeum
6:00pm
June 21 • Montpelier, VT Library talk & signing
2:00pm
September 14 • New York, NY 92nd Street Y reading with Deborah Levy
7:00pm
October 29 • Hanover, NH Dartmouth College visiting writer series
5:00pm
Press
“Hale writes with a restraint that feels almost radical. Every sentence earns its place.”
— The New York Times Book Review, 1997
“A master of the unsaid. Her novels accumulate power the way snow accumulates on a roof.”
— The Atlantic, 1995
“Winter Letters is one of the most moving novels about grief I have read in many years.”
— The Guardian, 1996
Newsletter
Occasional notes on reading, writing, and the seasons. No more than four times a year.