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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 33–48 of 106 results
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Here
$22.95One house, one hundred years — Here is a collection of interconnected short stories that bend time with a complex and varied cast of characters passing through a single mansion in Newfoundland, confronting the ghosts of family, perseverance, redemption, and survival.
Here is a collection of interconnected short stories that trails the inhabitants of a colonial mansion on Circular Road in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, over a span of 100 years. Aristocrats, hippies, housemaids, an all-girl rock band, a politician, a theologian, a biologist, a ballerina, a crow—over the decades, the house has a way of bending time for its varied occupiers, making readers question how our histories shape us and whether we can ever truly escape, or make peace with, the ghosts of the past.
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How She Read
$20.00How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.
Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson’s sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps.
A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape.
Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness. Undoing the North Star freedom myth, Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond shed light on the effects of erasure in the time of reconciliation and the dangers of squeezing the past into a Canada History Minute or a single postage stamp. Centrefolds Delia and Marie Therese discuss their naked Black bodies and what it means to be enslaved, a human subject of art and an object of science, while Veronica? tells it like it is, what it means to hang with the Group of Seven on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario amongst the lakes, the glaciers, the mountains and the dying trees. Supported by the voices of Black women writers, the poems unloose the racist misogyny, myths, tropes and stereotypes women of colour continue to navigate every day.
Thoughtful, sassy, reflective and irreverent, How She Read leaves a Black mark on the landscape as it illustrates a writer’s journey from passive receiver of racist ideology to active cultural critic in the process of decolonizing her mind.
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How to Breathe Water
$24.95A road trip through the prairies prompts acclaimed writer Sharon Butala to unearth the stories of the natural world around her, and at the same time revisit her own personal histories.
After an isolating and demoralizing year during the COVID-19 pandemic, a friend invites Sharon Butala to join her on a road trip – together they will drive the thirteen hundred kilometers from Calgary to Winnipeg, stopping as they please along the way. Sharon, relieved for a change of scenery, is keen to see again some of the locations that have been significant to her life on the prairies, including the ranch she lived on for thirty-three years with her husband before his death.
But along the way, the sites they visit – landmarks of Indigenous history, sites where her ancestors struggled to eke out a living – prompt Sharon to unearth her own personal history. She sifts through memories of a difficult childhood, of traumas deeply buried, of relationships both complicated and gratifying. Taking stock of the people and places she has lost and left behind brings her to the ultimate confrontation – with mortality – which she explores with uncommon wisdom and frankness.
Her most intimate work to date, Sharon Butala’s How to Breathe Water is a love letter to the lands and waters of the prairies and a stirring exploration of the places and moments that mark and mold our lives.
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Hunting History
$34.95Hunting History: A Writer’s Odyssey is an unforgettable journey through time, memory, and the enduring power of storytelling. From an unexpected visit to a Nazi death camp to gripping encounters with perpetrators of atrocities, their victims, determined activists, and wily propagandists, award-winning author Erna Paris takes readers on a deeply personal exploration of how history is remembered, manipulated, and lived.
Blending investigative journalism with memoir, Paris traces a lifelong quest to understand the psychological and cultural forces that shape the best and worst of human behavior—its triumphs and its darkest impulses. In this, her final work, she delivers a profound and urgent meditation on truth, justice, and the writer’s role in illuminating the past to guide the future.
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In Crow’s Field
$24.95Ana Burns is lying in an abandoned farmer’s field, falling asleep as the sun sets, when her mind is transported to her childhood, to another time, another field, where her life changed forever.
Growing up in Middletown, Connecticut, in the 1960s, Ana lives mostly in her imagination. One day, while collecting wildflowers in Crow’s Field with a friend, two older boys approach to ask what they’re doing. So begins the reliving of a violent attack that shaped the lives of the young girls.
When her family moves to Kingston, Ontario, amid Canada’s Centennial celebrations, Ana is determined to start anew. She will no longer be the quiet girl who follows someone else’s lead. She will be her own person. Her teenage years are a time of new friends and sexual discoveries, but also severe bullying. Though she continues to be haunted by the events in Crow’s Field, Ana becomes a woman willing to act and to speak.
In the debut novel from one of Canada’s leading playwrights, Judith Thompson delivers a transformative story of a young woman’s path out of silence.
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Jelly, Baby
$24.95In this revelatory collection of lyrical and poetic essays, Therese Estacion explores vital themes relating to her life as a disabled person.
Defying genre and constraint, Estacion conveys how ableism has impacted her disposition and self-esteem. She also confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.
Jelly, Baby fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love. Inspired by Estacion’s psychotherapy training, this book is a tender examination of some of the most vulnerable aspects of the self, and a head-on challenge of self-loathing. The result is a beautiful and astute meditation on ableism and a transformative journey deep into the psyche.
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Just Around the Corner
$26.95Just Around the Corner is the story of Member of Parliament for Labrador, Yvonne Rumbolt-Jones, a woman from a northern community who broke free of her geographic and political isolation to embrace opportunity.
JUST AROUND THE CORNER is the story of Member of Parliament for Labrador Yvonne Rumbolt-Jones, a woman from a northern community who broke free of geographic and political isolation to embrace opportunity. An intimate memoir from the longest-serving female politician in Newfoundland and Labrador, Just Around the Corner uncovers Rumbolt-Jones’s strength as a survivor as well as her determination and courage through both her private life and her political life. She reveals her early years of dealing with child sexual abuse and experiences with family alcoholism, and her challenges as an adult confronting personal grief and loss, the sexism, public scrutiny, and challenges of party politics, as well as being diagnosed with cancer—twice. Through it all, the thread of Rumbolt-Jones’s love for Labrador and its people, and her hope and joy in working for the future of both shines through. She writes with confidence and candour about overcoming adversity and marginality to be elected to both the provincial House of Assembly and the national Parliament, where she has been a strong leader and voice for women, Indigenous peoples, and Canada’s North. Her story is that of a woman who refused to let the scars of the past define her, but rather used them to help her grow and understand that while we may not control what harms us, we can control how we move forward.
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Late Bloomer
$24.95Born in the shadow of World War II, Mary Lou Dickinson came of age in an era that expected women to conform?but she never did. A feminist writer of the Silent Generation, she carved her own path as a single mother in the 1970s, juggling multiple jobs to support herself and her children.
Her life changed when she found solidarity in the women?s movement, drawing earlier inspiration from Betty Friedan and later working to support survivors of assault. Though she had long published stories in literary magazines, it wasn?t until the age of 70 that her first book was published, proving that it?s never too late to claim ones voice. -
Like a River Divides the Earth
$22.95Award-winning writer Dora Dueck returns with five masterfully crafted stories about family tensions, misunderstandings, and Mennonite communities.
A fourteen-year-old girl sees her soldier father’s face for the first time. A group of “young old” women find community living together in a boxy modern house, until a mystifying event causes them to question what they thought they had. Decades after immigrating from Russia, a Mennonite woman comes to terms with a buried resentment from her past.
In these five keenly observed stories, Dora Dueck fully inhabits the worlds of her characters, who encounter grief and misunderstanding but also tenderness and connection. With grace and insight, Like a River Divides the Earth explores the moments that divide us and the ways our lives are indelibly stitched together.
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Little Spoons
$19.95Amidst the unique landscape and history of French Newfoundland, rumours of the supernatural and a sudden death unearth family secrets.
After the unexpected death of her grandmother, Mary inherits her property and returns home to western Newfoundland with her young son. When she uncovers curious items that may be clues about her grandmother’s fate, Mary begins to unravel the secrets surrounding a string of suspicious disappearances and deaths in the community—deaths that always seem to involve women.
Demons from the past catch up with Mary as she learns of her grandmother’s isolation from her peers. Discovering stories of witchcraft and rumours of the supernatural, she attempts to piece together her family’s story—a story that may have led to her grandmother’s death. When someone else goes missing, Mary must act quickly to untangle the strings of fact and fiction, or risk drowning in the same rumours that haunted those before her.
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Love You Wrong Time
$18.95Love You Wrong Time is an uproarious, raunchy, and radically joyful song cycle from your new favourite Korean and Filipina–Vietnamese musical duo. Part cabaret, part game show, part stand-up, and all heart, this flamboyant musical comedy follows two friends looking for love while navigating yellow fever, cultural stereotypes, and the fetishization of Asian femmes.
Blending biting satire with virtuosic spectacle, the show leaps across genres—from K-pop to country to Gaga-style anthems—while inviting audiences to play for prizes in “ricebreakers” and re-enactments. The book includes original sheet music as well as behind-the-scenes insights into the show’s evolving creative process. Disrupting the subservient “model minority” myth, Love You Wrong Time is a battle cry for Asians ready to make a riot, creating a space for reclamation and resistance. It’s a good time with teeth.
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Minerva’s Owl
$21.95A moving, deeply honest account of great love and loss – this small book is a tender companion for those who are grieving.
After “nine days in which we thought you would recover and then eight days in palliative care,” Carol Matthew’s husband of more than forty years passed away suddenly. Through the shock and grief that follows, Carol writes and writes, with love and anger and honesty and heartbreak, as she comes to an understanding of bereavement as not the end, but as a stage of married love.
The owl of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, spreads its wings only at twilight. In Minerva’s Owl, Carol Matthews finds solace in reflecting back on a marriage, a life, a person – in lyrical prose, in devastating honesty, and with hard-won insight.
Structured in six sections – grieving, longing, belonging, mourning, cleaving, and surviving – Minerva’s Owl offers not a step-by-step guide to grief, but an understanding companion to walk with the reader through dark days. Part grief memoir, part love story, this book is a gift for anyone who has lost someone they loved. This new second edition of the book provides a new epilogue that reflects on loss more than a decade later, and a new introduction from Maria Coffey, author of Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest.
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Motherness
$24.95“As more women are recognizing their own neurodivergence, Julie has gifted us with a beautifully written and incredibly relatable memoir. Readers will come away feeling seen, understood, and never again alone.” — Emily W. King, PhD, child psychologist and author of the Learn with Dr. Emily Substack
A funny, unflinchingly honest, and deeply compassionate memoir about one woman’s experience of raising an autistic child while discovering she is also “on the spectrum”
Almost 10 years after learning that her son is autistic, Julie Green was also diagnosed, shedding light on a lifetime of feeling othered and misunderstood. Motherness traces Julie’s journey from childhood to early motherhood, when she must advocate for her son while navigating her own struggles.
With more girls and women being diagnosed in the last decade — many of them later in life — the face of autism is changing. Motherness provides a rich, intensely personal account of what it is like to be autistic, through the lens of both a mother and child. Topics include sensory processing, meltdowns and shutdowns, masking, empathy, alexithymia, bullying, elopement, special interests, disordered eating, gender diversity, twice exceptionality, and more.
Motherness is a story about accepting your child while learning to accept yourself. This extraordinary, groundbreaking memoir speaks to the great challenges and great joys of autism, providing valuable insights to parents of autistic children, adults newly diagnosed or questioning their place on the spectrum, and anyone seeking a greater understanding of neurodiversity.
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My Forests
$22.95Hélène Dorion’s lauded collection My Forests celebrates and examines our complex relationship with the natural world. The poems gathered here serve not only as hymns of praise to the trees, but also as vital warnings of fragility—both theirs and our own.
Dorion lives surrounded by lakes and forests, rivers and shores, in the fog of memory and in vast estuaries where thoughts flow into the sea. Taking inspiration from this vivid landscape, she delves into the heart of the forest, while also exploring how our relationship with nature has deteriorated over time. Lush and sensual images evoke the forest’s enduring beauty, locating nature within the noise of the world and the passage of time.
By imploring us to listen to the chorus of the trees, My Forests offers the hope that we will protect our shared home and envision a collective future in which all people can live in dignity. Seeking a way out of the darkness, Dorion’s poems lead us toward “a vast and luminous path / that gives meaning / to what we call humanity.”
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Named and Nameless
$19.95In this new collection of poetry, Susan McCaslin explores the meaning and significance of identity and all that can be found in a name, or, lack thereof. Mixing the personal with the societal, McCaslin explores her own past and women’s continued role in child-rearing. This dreamlike series of encounters with nature and the divine invites deep reflection through re-discovering the familiar. Her joyful wordplay invites us to notice the tiniest details and contemplate the divine.
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New-Fangled Rose
$22.00Finalist, Pamela Paige Porter Poetry Prize
Like a rose blooming out of season, the poems in Sue Sinclair’s newest collection are unexpected, unforgettably beautiful, and an unwavering gesture toward the slow emergency of climate crisis. With the lyrical brilliance and keen eye trained on beauty that’s characteristic of Sinclair, New-Fangled Rose reaches toward the light with reverent hands, photosynthesizing it into poems that are deft, musical, and unquestionably alive.
These poems cast a wide gaze over a fragile world, offering vibrant elegies to luna moths and crab apples, fireflies and trilliums. They examine what it is to build relationships in a world that feels increasingly precarious, like at any moment, something may end; like at any moment, something may begin.