A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
Books for Women’s History Month
We honour Women’s History Month in Canada with stellar fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and more by women.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 106 results
-
A Bow Forged from Ash
$21.95A Bow Forged from Ash is a journey of Indigenous reclamation. In poems that explore identity, belonging, responsibility and wholeness, Melissa Powless Day navigates her ties to the landscapes of Southwestern Ontario and the nations to which she belongs. Traversing lived experience, ancestral memory, family stories, and critical engagements with the Land, Powless Day pulls back the bow of language: her poems are poised, unyielding in their nanda-gikendang, their seeking, to voice complex stories about the messiness of returning home, a restoration of familial and community bonds generations in the making. Ultimately, A Bow Forged from Ash is a book that proves reclamation and resistance are inseparable: one cannot walk with pride in their Indigeneity without choosing to resist the colonial status quo.
-
A Hungry Fire
$24.95When Queen Dido, founder of the great city of Carthage, was abandoned by her lover, the Trojan prince Aeneas, she asserted her power by climbing a funeral pyre, thus sealing a curse on his descendants for generations to come.
Her twenty-first-century namesake, however, doesn’t want her life to end in flames. She needs answers.
Since encountering Vergil’s Aeneid in the paintings of a childhood book, Modern Dido has striven to become as fearsome as her ancient counterpart. A driven and artistic civil engineer who dreams of designing her own Carthage, she navigates the thirteen-year pursuit of a diagnosis for her chronic, unexplained pelvic pains through the lens of the Roman epic. Princes and gods become doctors and protectors who follow her through years of tests, educated guesses, and medications. Her Aeneas is not a lover but a gynecologist.
Through the ages, the muses have sung of the rage of Achilles and the cunning of Odysseus. Now, with acerbic humour, they bear witness for a modern audience to the wrath of Dido as she waves a wonky speculum aloft.
-
A Ramshackle Home
$22.95Felicia Mihali writes: “I would like this novel to be read as a universal story about little girls born in small and poor villages around the world who are not as lucky as those born in big cities and in good families. These are girls who have to struggle to succeed, to fight their own complexes and their shame over not being more fortunate. For many of them their only escape is through the imagination.”
-
A Temporary Grace
$22.95In an unflinching examination of the modern love story, A Temporary Grace is a raw and insightful exploration of power, vulnerability, and our urgent need to redefine intimacy.
Set in modern-day Newfoundland, A Temporary Grace weaves together a series of interconnected stories that navigate the complexities of dating in the post-MeToo era and through the oppressive forces that trap us in outdated patterns. Liberation is elusive. Coercive control masquerades behind performative displays of “goodness,” making it difficult to recognize and resist. Brutally honest and yearning for self-actualization, these stories grapple with restless desire as predation and scams plague progressive circles and power imbalances lurk in unconventional relationships.
-
AFRODISIAQUE
$19.95Bursting with colours, aromas, and afro hair products, AFRODISIAC is a vibrant celebration of womanhood, self-love, and the magic of natural hair. Inspired by oral histories and real interviews with hair specialists, Maryline Chery’s spellbinding solo show braids together stories of racism, beauty standards, high-school bullying, and fierce resilience. Ethereal and empowering, AFRODISIAC is for every Black and Brown woman learning to love herself in a world that tries to make her small. It’s glistening. It’s messy. It’s Haitian. It’s healing. Above all, it’s unapologetically Black.
-
As Good a Place as Any
$22.95A teenaged refugee chases stardom but finds her purpose in Canada’s abortion-rights movement. Fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup, sixteen-year-old Paulina and her older brother Ernesto settle in Toronto. While Ernesto dreams of a glorious homecoming, Paulina embraces her liberation from the conventional life expected of her back home. Yet despite landing her first big role on a popular children’s cartoon, and her first girlfriend, she cannot escape survivor’s guilt. Haunted by the death of a childhood friend, she joins the underground struggle for reproductive freedom. But when a fellow exile pleads for her help terminating a pregnancy, Paulina’s public and private selves threaten to collide.
-
As the Morning Rising
$24.95The year is 1958, and Sister Alphonsine, a nun in a community of teaching nuns dominated by an authoritarian Reverend Mother, is sent away for re-education because her transgressions against the Holy Rule have caught up with her. In a richly detailed portrait of convent life, the story unfolds of her gradual emergence back into the same restricted milieu as the world outside moves on with the onset of a new decade and changes within the Church shakes its foundation. The restless students in St. Monica?s Girls? School, where the nuns teach, burst through the careful armour the nuns have had to build around themselves as they too confront the swinging sixties.
-
Barbara
$24.95From the author of Double Teenage and Talking Animals comes an intimate portrait of a woman losing and finding her identity through the business and art of moviemaking.
Barbara is born just before World War II to a tragically beautiful mother and a father who becomes an engineer in the famous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her mother dies by suicide. These realities of war and personal loss shape her consciousness going forward.
She grows up to become an actress, restlessly travelling the world between film sets and love affairs, from the Bronx to Athens, the Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Navigating decades and genres, Barbara moves from austere 1950s kitchen sink dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics. She takes on and sheds many roles, temporarily becoming a vampire’s victim and a stylish mistress, a martyred saint and a bored housewife. She enjoys clandestine sexual encounters and endures an illegal abortion; she marries, divorces, and remarries, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be her great love.
An intense, layered distillation of a zeitgeist, Murphy’s latest novel whispers tales of independent cinema and grimy show business, militarism and physics, bomb making and image consumption. It is a study of the mirroring and splitting between old and new worlds, inner sensations, and outward performance. Ultimately, Barbara unspools a delicate yet propulsive tale of a woman grasping for a meaningful life amid the reflective, broken shards of the long 20th century.
-
Bilijk
$50.00The head of tide of the Wəlastəkw, known as Ekwpahak in Wəlastəkwey, has long been a gathering place for the Wəlastəkokewiyik and was reserved for them by colonial authorities in the mid-18th century. However, when 11,000 Loyalists invaded unceded Wəlastəkwey territory after the American Revolution, and the influential Judge Isaac Allen purchased Ekwpahak in a highly questionable dealing, the Wəlastəkokewiyik were deprived of their land, with some forced to settle a few miles upriver at Kingsclear.
In this long-awaited volume, Andrea Bear Nicholas assembles Oral Traditions, archival documents, paintings, maps, and photographs to document the history of the Kingsclear First Nation community, from its establishment in the late-18th century to the disastrous mid-20th century attempt to centralize the Wəlastəkwey Nation at Kingsclear. These documents demonstrate the destructive impact of colonialism upon the Wəlastəkokewiyik, from their dispossession by Loyalists and the establishment of the Sussex Vale Indian School in the late 18th century, to the increasing restrictions on traditional life that both impoverished and oppressed them.
-
Black Girl in The Ring
$19.95Juxtaposing experiences of discrimination with love and resilience, this debut poetry collection is a critique of intimate and institutional violence and hostility, entwined with a celebration of beauty and fierceness.
What is the difference between institutional violence enacted by trusted individuals and intimate violence enacted by loved ones? This collection of free verse, haiku, and narrative poetry takes the reader by the hand and walks them through these parallel experiences from a personal perspective. In a study of relationships of power, these poems delve into the complex structures of feminism, nature, and discrimination. A balanced mixture of reflection, celebration, energy, and sadness unfolds within the pages; drawing on a contemporary style, the author creates the space to feel grief, loss, sorrow, and disappointment in equal measure with joy, contemplation, excitement, and elation.
-
BLEED
$24.95“A brilliant, blistering read.” — Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
A scorching examination of how we treat endometriosis today
Have you ever been told that your pain is imaginary? That feeling better just takes yoga, CBD oil, and the blood of a unicorn on a full moon? That’s the reality of the more than 190 million people suffering the excruciating condition known as endometriosis. This disease affecting one in ten cis women and uncounted numbers of others is chronically overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood — and improperly treated across the medical system. Discrimination and medical gaslighting are rife in endo care, often leaving patients worse off than when they arrived.
Journalist Tracey Lindeman knows it all too well. Decades of suffering from endometriosis propelled the creation of BLEED — part memoir, part investigative journalism, and all scathing indictment of how the medical system fails patients. Through extensive interviews and research, BLEED tracks the modern endo experience to the origins of medicine and how the system gained its power by marginalizing women. Using an intersectional lens, BLEED dives into how the system perpetuates misogyny, racism, classism, ageism, transphobia, fatphobia, and other prejudices to this day.
BLEED isn’t a self-help book. It’s an evidence file and an eye-opening, enraging read. It will validate those who have been gaslit, mistreated, or ignored by medicine and spur readers to fight for nothing short of revolution.
-
Blood Root
$22.00Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death.
One moment tender, the next moment dark, hard, and raw, Blood Root blends diary entries, drawings, and lyricism to hold up a polished mirror to colonialism and its echoing impact. Considering beauty and horror in equal reverence “so I’m not human once removed,” Hiemstra cuts through pretence, bearing witness to humans as they confront and connect to one another and the larger world.
-
Breakaway
$26.00Winner, NB Book Award (Non-Fiction)
When the first puck dropped in the Professional Women’s Hockey League in January 2024, it had been a long time coming. Women have been playing hockey since at least 1890 and playing professionally for decades. But until 2024, even the highest-level female players had never been compensated as professionals: some paid for their own gear and worked second jobs, earning a pittance, if anything, from their chosen profession.
In Breakaway, Karissa Donkin tells the story of the players’ efforts to create the PWHL, long before the first full season in 2024. Following the unnamed 2024 Montreal PWHL team, with some of the best players in the sport, like Marie-Philip Poulin and Erin Ambrose, Donkin takes readers through the League’s founding, the draft process, the practices, and the dramatic arc of the first season. Defying all expectations, with larger crowds and higher revenues than anticipated, this first season was a gamechanger for professional women’s sports leagues.
-
Breath Taking
$22.95An unflinching and tender recollection of illness, death, and grief, sensitively exploring the dynamic between the burden of care and the burden of dying.
Carolyn Smart’s latest poetry collection offers a striking meditation on the death of her partner of nearly forty years. Structured in five distinct parts, this deeply moving book unfolds like a tragedy—each section like an act in a play, the individual poems key scenes in a shared life coming to an end.
The language in Breath Taking is direct and exacting, with colloquial phrases that animate and complicate the emotional pressure of the work itself. Familiar references are scattered throughout—Gould Lake, Road 38—not as a device, but as indications of the everyday world that love, pain, and death inhabit.
Intimate and exhaustive, this generous document doesn’t lean on a belief in God or the afterlife, nor does nature’s continuity offer an uncomplicated source of comfort. Instead, what is revealed is the unvarnished reality of love and loss—the arduous responsibilities, the fragile attempts at recovery, the wishful thinking that what is gone will one day return. Breath Taking is a profound, vital reflection on the end of a life, and on those who go on living.
-
Caesaria
$24.95Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Translation
From Hanna Nordenhök comes a gothic tale set at the dawn of modern gynecology, when the female body appears as a cryptic landscape and male hubris reigns.
On a remote country estate in nineteenth-century Sweden, a renowned obstetrician keeps a young girl named Caesaria as a trophy: she was the first baby he delivered by caesarean section. She lives a dollhouse existence, characterized by supervision and punishment, assault and incarceration. Told in lush, elegant, and dreamlike prose, Caesaria narrates her confinement in the doctor’s mansion and encounters with its mysterious inhabitants and visitors.
Radiating a low-level dread and sense of unease, Caesaria probes gender warfare and class oppression. What is reality to those who have grown up trapped in their own bodies, without connection to the outside world? Nordenhök shares an astonishing answer, almost mythological in scope, through the tale of one eponymous girl.
-
Cantaloupe!
$22.95Navigating constantly changing social and familial relationships, the women in M. Jay Smith’s stories strive to hold everything together and stay true to their convictions in the process.
Cantaloupe! brings us nine juicy stories about trying (and failing) to do the right thing – about yearning to stay true to yourself, in a culture that demands compromising even the most deeply held convictions. With razor-sharp prose, M. Jay Smith contemplates how identities smudge into each other, how they shout and push and wither and explode under pressure. How complicated is Indigeneity and gender and class. How jagged and haunting childhood experiences can be on motherhood. How, no matter what, one’s best intentions go a little bit awry.