Books for International Women's Day
Check out this round up of books by and about women for International Women's Day!
View books in this list
View books in this list
Illuminating, poised, and wholly original, the poems of Sharon King-Campbell’s This Is How It Is range across the planet from New Zealand to Thailand to Newfoundland, gathering along the way voices both historical and mythological in a compelling display of dramatic empathy ... Read more
The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman's unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about ... Read more
Laced with humour and revelation, Anne Wheeler's creative non-fiction stories tell of her serendipitous journey in the seventies, when she broke with tradition and found her own way to becoming a filmmaker and raconteur.
Join this celebrated screenwriter and director as she ... Read more
Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.
Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions ... Read more
The voices of Blue Marrow sing out from the past and the present. They are the voices of the Grandmothers, both personal and legendary. They share their wisdom, their lives, their dreams. They proclaim the injustice of colonialism, the violence of proselytism, and the horrors ... Read more
It is 2058, and the glaciers are gone. A catastrophic drought has hit the prairies. Willa Van Bruggen is desperately trying to keep her family goat farm afloat, hoping against hope that the new water pipeline arrives before the bill collectors do.
Willa's son, Daniel, goes to ... Read more
Winner of the High Plains Book Award and the Saskatchewan Fiction Award. An innovative, gorgeously written story about the small decisions that shape our lives.
Meet Sylvie -- funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can't always count on herself to make good choices. She may or ... Read more
A memorable and clandestine love story between two visionary artists in 19th-century Paris.
"These madmen -- and one madder woman -- paint as if suffering seizures! One cannot make heads or tails of the work without taking ten paces back. "
In One Madder Woman, Dede Crane vividly ... Read more
Winner of the 2021 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry * 2021 ReLit Awards Longlist
A love story to the emotional self—this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.
What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far ... Read more
2021 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award Shortlist * 2021 Elgin Awards Longlist
Poems written by Cyborgs in the future?this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, human and machine.
The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs ... Read more
Poems that sing, in various notes of female voice, the human being as an embodied, contemplative, feeling animal.
In Skov-Nielsen's thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected with the surrounding trees, bugs, rivers, atmospheres, and cosmos. Here, ... Read more
Critically acclaimed in the original French, The Fifth offers a refreshing take on sexuality and desire. Alice, Gayle, Camille and Simon live together in a polyamorous relationship, affectionately referred to as the Family. Camille, a trans woman, and Gayle are lovers; Simon ... Read more
Within us all are questions of identity, belonging, and connection. Beth Kope's third poetry collection, Atlas of Roots, is a work of the heart that uncovers the many facets of adoption. In poems that both witness and question, Kope shares her own quest to uncover family history ... Read more
Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus-sized women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with ... Read more
After moving to Vancouver's West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle ... Read more
Finalist for the 2020 Foreword Indies – Science Fiction Category
What does it mean to say "I love you"?
Ariadne is a single, fortysomething writer and mother embroiled in an affair with a married man. At the core of her current manuscript, a book about the declaration of love, ... Read more
Some secrets never die. ..
Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn't know is that in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both ... Read more
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
Longlisted for the National Book Awards: Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize
Winner of the 2018 Bolshaya Kniga Award
Winner of the 2019 NOS Literature Prize
An exciting contemporary Russian writer ... Read more
While on vacation with her family in Valencia, Claire Halde witnesses a shocking event that becomes the catalyst for a protracted downward spiral and a profound personal unravelling as she struggles to come to grips with her role in the incident. This haunting novel, which unfolds ... Read more
Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2021
Reflections on a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough.
Bittersweet is an exciting, accomplished collection of poems evoking both a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough (Ontario). Using memory--intimate as well as collective--prompted ... Read more
Maame is a collection of linked stories about women in a small community in Ghana. Life in the village is a constant rotation between the real and the supernatural. For girls there exists a short window between childhood and adulthood, in which they must learn to navigate a stringent ... Read more
Finish this Sentence is about a personal experience in dealing with racism and healing from its effects. As this book weaves through the anger and anxiety provoked by racism, it points to the ultimate realization: one is neither the conditioning nor the incessant chatter that ... Read more
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, Bisexual Fiction Category.
Two sex addicts meet and fall in love. A woman catches her husband cheating on her with their dog and escapes to her sister's horse farm. Four friends—fellow pervs—grow up and drift apart, pining for ... Read more
“The internet’s best friend. ” — Flare
From the author of the popular newsletter That’s What She Said, Nobody Cares is a frank, funny personal essay collection about work, failure, friendship, and the messy business of being alive in your twenties and thirties.
As ... Read more
Grand in scope, spare in execution, and lush in language, 26 Knots is a fable-like tale of love, obsession, and everything in between. Araceli loves Adrien. Adrien loves Pénélope. Pénélope marries Gabriel, who is tormented by the search for the father he never knew. Set in ... Read more
From the Klondike to an all-girls summer camp to the frontier of outer space, Gold Rush explores what it means to be a settler woman in the wilderness. Drawing on and subverting portrayals of nature from Susanna Moodie to Cheryl Strayed, Caldwell’s poems examine the tension ... Read more
Winner of the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards’ George Bugnet Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Indie Author Project Award for Alberta
Shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award for Fiction
A Casual Optimist Book Cover of Note
An exciting debut novel told in connected short stories ... Read more
A profoundly honest and intensely personal story of a woman who cares for her husband after the devastating terminal diagnosis of ALS.
Marty, age 57, was given a preliminary diagnosis of ALS by his family doctor. Seven weeks later, the diagnosis was confirmed by a neurologist. ... Read more
In 1808, the Russian Ship St. Nikolai ran aground off the Olympic Peninsula; this novel is based on this astounding historical event and the lives of the people affected.
In 1808, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovna Bulygina is aboard the Russian ship St. Nikolai when it runs aground ... Read more
A collection of essays inspired by EMMA Talks, a speakers’ series committed to amplifying the voices of thinkers, activists, scholars, artists, and community builders who are also women-identified, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks.
From Idle No More to Black Lives Matter ... Read more
What if you made the worst mistake of your life and got the chance to fix it? Only you made it so much worse? From the incomparable crafter of nine cross-genre works of fiction, Lisa deNikolits expands her horizons to pen a grab-you-by-the-throat, feminist speculative-fiction ... Read more
Finalist for the 2021 Rasmussen & Co. Indigenous Peoples' Writing Award
The Narrows of Fear (Wapawikoscikanik) weaves the stories of a group of women committed to helping one another. Despite abuse experienced by some, both in their own community and in residential schools, these ... Read more
From the moment she holds her baby niece, Rose is on a mission. Terrified that her baby niece will fall victim to the sexual abuse rampant in the family, Rose tells us in her own warm, funny, down-to-earth voice, how she reluctantly agrees to join a therapy group, hoping she ... Read more
Shortlisted for Best Cover Design at the 2020 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
In this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and relationships. With ironic accuracy and sensuous imagery, ... Read more
Book one in a new playful and trope-bending mystery series featuring a queer, nameless amateur detective.
“Candas Jane Dorsey’s terrific mysteries are what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Frank N. Furter collaborated on cozies and the heroine were a pansexual private ... Read more
For fans of Amy Jones
A deeply felt novel about human connection and finding music between the notes from the author of The Gallery of Lost Species, a Harper’s Bazaar Hottest Breakout Novel
“Capturing the joy that’s brought through camaraderie and passion, Why Birds Sing ... Read more
Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of "blackness" and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of "evil" and "savagery. " Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science ... Read more
As the world around them collapses under the weight of a slow, creeping virus that erodes memory, fifteen-year-old Dany and her little sister are on the edge of their own personal apocalypse – fearing separation at the hands of child services. When a dangerous new strain of ... Read more
In this searing and seriously funny memoir Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down, a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate it. Born with congenital anomalies in both feet, then called birth defects, she was adopted as a toddler by a wounded 1950s family who had no idea ... Read more
Emily Dickinson is as famous for being a recluse as she is for her poetry. In this stunning novel, we see her struggling to reconcile spirit and flesh, preferring letters and reflecting that the only way to have books and life is to live through one’s own writing. Dominique ... Read more
Now You See Her nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore Awards; Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Costume Design & Outstanding Sound Design/Composition.
Now You See Her named one of Toronto’s Top Ten Plays of 2018 by the Toronto Star.
Six diverse women’s voices merge into one ... Read more
Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?
ONE OF ENTROPY MAGAZINE'S BEST NONFICTION OF 2020/2021
If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda ... Read more
From holding hands in the womb to holding each other’s hair back when they puked, twins Laura and Lizzie grew up only having each other. They couldn’t count on their practically feral mom, absent dad, or even the boys they liked. They’re polar opposites—Laura’s reserved ... Read more
When an accident jeopardizing the family farm draws Amiah Williams back to Kingsley, Alberta, population 1431, she doesn't expect her homecoming to make front-page news. But there she is in The Inquirer, the mysterious tabloid that is airing her hometown's dirty laundry. Alongside ... Read more
If Tenderness Be Gold is set in 19th-century and early 20th-century northern Ontario and Manitoba. An Irish mother, an Italian herbalist, and a Scottish midwife come together on the night of a difficult birth, and the result of their union has effects that echo through the generations. ... Read more
Mooncalves follows the bloody implosion of a cult in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, understood through the urgent voices of the living and a ring of ghostly, shape-shifting watchers. Sensing the impending dissolution of society by technological progress, the charismatic, utterly ... Read more
We'll send you bi-monthly updates to keep you in the loop on the best of our blog, special campaigns and offers, AND news on the latest in literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry from indie publishers across Canada.
Copyright © 2022 All Lit Up. All Rights Reserved.
All Lit Up is produced by the Literary Press Group and LitDistCo. LPG and LitDistCo acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.
All views expressed by bloggers and contributors to the All Lit Up blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of All Lit Up or the Literary Press Group.
All Lit Up acknowledges we are hosted on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat. We also recognize the enduring presence of all First Nations, Métis and the Inuit people, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to meet and work on this territory.