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 49–64 of 110 results
-
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.
-
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.
-
Night Birds
$26.00A catastrophe on a mountain in Transylvania sends toxic cyanide hurtling through rivers and streams, destroying an ecosystem and killing hundreds. As the impact of the mining breach stretches beyond the country’s borders, it ensnares Farrar and Clio, a couple living on another continent, who begin to understand that their business interests are intertwined with enterprises more sinister than they’d realized.
Fearing the wrath of Peter Zugravi, a criminal with international reach, Farrar sends Clio and their daughter Sydney to a remote island where he hopes Zugravi will never find them. It’s here that Clio finally unlocks the family secrets and the mysterious origins of her family’s wealth.
With characteristically razor-sharp prose, Margaret Sweatman mines the dark caverns of global capitalism in this new addition to the resource “noir” canon. Intense, visceral, and agile, Night Birds is an all-absorbing thriller, whose morally complex characters are called upon to reckon with the power than runs beneath their feet and the consequences of their own complicity.
-
Nightnursing
$22.00Shortlisted, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
In a world where the innate need for “better” is both trauma and treatment, what does sobriety and recovery really mean?
Nightnursing explores memory, care, and the mercurial nature of recovery from a Queer and Black perspective. At once intimate and adventurous, Nightnursing embraces uncertainty and the beauty of unfinished work, questioning the systems that define wellness and inclusion.
Reid’s experimental and playful poems drift through the haze of time, pressing fists to the boundaries of language and the self, and simultanteously running towards and away from reality.
-
Non-Prophet
$22.00Winner of the Claire Harris Poetry Prize
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award (LGBTQ+ Poetry)
Finalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted, Raymond Souster AwardRaw, reverent, and bursting with searing vulnerability, Non-Prophet canvases the electric tension between devotion and doubt to gods both personal and ubiquitous, and reflects on the natural and built worlds in their claims to the sacred. Winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize, Qurat Dar’s bold debut collection explores what it is to grapple with faith that’s “just another language you’re losing, or one you never learned to speak.”
Weaving through the boundaries of language and form, Non-Prophet meditates on things “just mundane enough to be holy / just holy enough to be mundane” — the death of a bird, the cries of mid-nightmare prayers, the misplaced shame of what it is to bleed. Dar’s poems both rage and reconcile, holding gently the pieces of a fractured identity.
-
Northern Bull
$24.95Over the course of one bitterly cold winter day in Yellowknife, Northern Bull takes readers on a joyful and hilarious journey of love and friendship as a quirky cast of characters sets out to find a missing moose head.
It’s a cold, dark January day in Yellowknife. A down-on-his-luck fisherman, Jacques, needs to convince his landlord not to tear down his ramshackle house. But when his volatile hunting buddy, Craig, accuses him of stealing a prized moose head, Jacques must put everything aside to find the bull before midnight, or there’s no telling what Craig might do.
Meanwhile, Jacques’s next-door neighbour Maggie is trying to face her fears by writing a story for the annual community burlesque show. But when she accidentally breaks Jacques’s window, she is determined to help save his home and find the moose head—and maybe something more.
Over a single day, with flashbacks to the hunting trip that started it all and culminating in a wild night no one in Yellowknife will ever forget, we follow Jacques, Maggie and a quirky cast of supporting characters as they race against time—on snowmobiles—to find the moose, brave the stage, and take a chance on themselves and on love. A hilarious and charming ode to life in the north.
-
One in Six Million
$26.00Maria was eight months old in 1942 when a childless couple found her, wrapped in a blanket, at the side of a road near Krosno, Poland. A note pinned to the blanket stated only her first name and her date of birth. The couple picked up Maria and raised her, but she grew up longing for identity and connection. Who was she, and what had happened to her family?
Years later, Maria’s story came to the attention of Stanley Diamond. Diamond was the founder of Jewish Records Indexing-Poland, one of the largest databases of Jewish vital records and a crucial tool in researching the stories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
In this engrossing story, Amy Fish shows how Diamond and an intrepid band of international volunteers compared photographs with genealogical records and smuggled DNA tests to provide Maria with family ties that she thought were lost to her forever. A tale of unexpected coincidences, astonishing revelations, and more than a little luck, One in Six Million is an amazing story of lost — and found — identity.
-
One Sunday Without Desire
$22.95In this unsettling allegorical tale, two nameless sisters find themselves in a derelict European hotel during a mysterious plague. When faced with a life-changing decision, the older sister must grapple with their shared trauma, and begins to wonder how well she really knew her younger sister at all.
One Sunday Without Desire asks how well we can ever know the people we love the most, and explores love, loss, grief, and memory through a haunting narrative that raises more questions than it answers.
-
One Thousand and A Night as Told by Larissa, Construction Shock-Worker
$25.00One Thousand and A Night as Told by Larissa, Construction Shock-Worker is both a comic and tragic saga of a Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish family, headed by an irreverent, no-nonsense eighty-year-old Larissa, whose vitality and life-affirming wit overcomes all the hurdles thrown her way by the Soviet regime. Both lighthearted and tragic, this tale of suffering and love takes us to Ukraine, central Russia, Siberia, Montenegro and Canada. The “silent generations” of the Soviet history speak through the voice of a woman who is trying to come to terms with the dramatic past of her two countries—Russia and Ukraine—as well as her own family history.
-
otherwise grossly unremarkable
$22.95Otherwise grossly unremarkable is the record of the near total destruction of one woman’s physical and emotional self from misdiagnosis to stage three diagnosis, through treatment after treatment, and onward to recovery and survivorship.
At only 35 years of age, Ashleigh Matthews found a dense mass in her breast that was eventually diagnosed as stage-three, grade-three multifocal invasive mammary carcinoma: breast cancer. This memoir tells the story of a regular woman facing an irregular cellular divergence at a young age. Cancer always sucks, but being in your mid-30s at diagnosis adds an extra layer of garbage thrown on top. There is no silver lining here, rather this book is an honest and raw chronicle of what the human body can endure and from what depths the human spirit can forge a new path home from. Otherwise grossly unremarkable demonstrates that any person that hears the word cancer used to medically describe their body becomes a survivor of cancer at that very same moment.
-
Outspoken
$23.95An Olympian recounts her experiences as a young gay athlete and coach in the 70s and 80s, turning discrimination into celebration.
When Betty Baxter was hired to coach the Canadian women’s volleyball team in 1980, she was met with a media frenzy as the first woman in the position. Then her career was cut short—Baxter was fired in January 1982 and tossed from volleyball at age twenty-nine because of rumours about her sexual orientation.
This personal memoir chronicles Baxter’s journey from a small-town prairie girl discovering her passion for sports, through the years of international success, including harsh coaches, excruciating training regimes and the inequities in the sports system, especially for a closeted gay athlete. After her abrupt dismissal, Baxter turned to activism, seeking equality for women, initiating a new coaching school and working for a healthy, visible LGBTQ+ community through the internationally recognized Gay Games.
Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist exposes the persistent flaws of elite sport in Canada. It lays bare a system so resistant to change that forty years later the same issues, particularly for women, remain under scrutiny. But it also highlights the resilience and perseverance required of marginalized athletes to survive. Most of all, it champions the capacity to succeed.
-
Pitfall
$24.95Frank Cork is head trader at Chicago’s leading brokerage firm. It’s October 1929, and Frank has made a killing trading wheat futures on the city’s commodities exchange. At thirty-two, Frank and his wife, Katrina, have climbed from the South Side to the tony northern suburbs. They’re at the top of their game in their stunning modernist home with two young children. But on October 29, 1929, Frank watches in the trading pit as his fortune is wiped out in a single day. Some traders skulk home while others lurk in the shadows of the Clark Street Bridge. Frank drags himself to Grand Central Station. Hawkers scream, “Black Tuesday, Market Crash,” as Frank staggers onto the nearest train. Flattened by shame, the fallen trader finally debarks a thousand miles later as his train crosses the border into Saskatchewan. Holed up in a shed on the Canadian Prairies, Frank wrestles with how to redeem himself and return home. The only opportunity in sight is selling Canadian whiskey to the Chicago mob. Frank faces setbacks at every turn, including a terrifying visit to the still in the tunnels under Moose Jaw. In Chicago, Frank’s firm is looking for him. Was it suicide? Murder? Everyone’s a suspect, from the managing partner to the mob-boss mayor.
-
Power
$24.95Home and Garden reporter, Robin MacFarland finds herself in the middle of yet another murder mystery. This time, aiming to prove that the death of the premier of Ontario at her family cottage had been murder and no mere accident.
-
Qillaniq
$49.95Inspired by the Inuktitut word describing the shimmering reflection of light on water, Qillaniq celebrates the vitality, creativity, and resilience of contemporary Indigenous art from across the circumpolar North.
Published to accompany the 2026 International Exhibition of Indigenous Art, this richly illustrated volume brings together nearly seventy artists and twenty-four writers from the circumpolar North Through essays, artwork, and critical reflection, Qillaniq explores the many voices, perspectives, and artistic practices shapingcommunities in Alaskaq, Nunavut, Nunatsiavut, and Kalaallit Nunaat to Sápmi today.
More than an exhibition catalogue, Qillaniq is an affirmation of Indigenous knowledge, joy, and belonging. Grounded in the values of community, creativity, and care, it offers a powerful portrait of the circumpolar world as it understands itself. Celebrating artists whose work challenges convention, honours cultural continuity, and imagines vibrant futures for generations to come.
-
Ransacking Troy
$18.95After nearly a decade of the Trojan War, the women of Greece are growing restless. Led by the indomitable Penelope and the fierce Clytemnestra, a band of Grecian women defy the odds and bravely set sail for the shores of Troy, determined to end the conflict themselves. The journey is fraught with danger—bloodthirsty warriors, mythical beasts, and the capricious will of the gods. But these women are no mere bystanders in the tales of men. Get ready to embark on the greatest adventure that Homer and Virgil never told.
A radical retelling of the ancient Greco-Roman epics, Ransacking Troy is a bold and brilliant reimagining of the most famous war story of all time, where women take centre stage as the rightful heroes. In her signature revisionist style, award-winning playwright Erin Shields brings a refreshing feminist twist to this thrilling odyssey, confronting the habitual violence and disregard for women’s lives that persist during times of war. A mythical tale for modern times, Ransacking Troy envisions what happens when women band together to build a better world.
-
Red Like Fruit
$18.95Meet Lauren, a journalist in the midst of covering a high-profile domestic violence case while a growing sense of unease pervades her thoughts. Now meet Luke, whom Lauren has asked to tell her story to the audience. Through Luke’s voice, Lauren reflects on buried memories of sexual experiences from her adolescence. Are these experiences just a part of being a woman, or are they trauma? And does Luke have the authority to help her understand her own life?
From the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning playwright of Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, Hannah Moscovitch is at the height of her dramatic powers in this masterful provocation about the role men’s voices play in women’s stories. Through an ingenious metatheatrical device, Red Like Fruit courageously interrogates the messy contradictions and complexities of complicity, consent, power, and truth in the post #MeToo era.