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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 65–80 of 106 results
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Saltbox Olive, The
$24.95Through the as-yet-untold story of Newfoundland soldiers in Italy during the Second World War, The Saltbox Olive is an evocative tale of the complex interactions between past and present, told through one woman’s search for the truth of her family’s mysterious past.
Caroline Fisher sets out to solve the mystery of why her grandfather burned his brother Arch’s wartime letters. The Saltbox Olive follows the wartime route of Arch, Tombstone, Slade, and Garl, members of the 166th British Army (Newfoundland) Artillery Regiment. After surviving the battles of the Sangro and Cassino, they are all but forgotten by British HQ in the mountains between Florence and Bologna, where war loses all semblance of logic, where their loyalties are tested, and where they encounter acts of brutality, revenge, and loneliness. Weaving their stories with those of Caroline and Min Fisher, war photographer Barbara Kerr, and partisan Lucia Capponi and her son Cosimo, The Saltbox Olive explores the role of individual responsibility in wartime, how photography influences our understanding of truth, and how sins committed in times of duress as well as declarations of love can ripple outward for generations. The Saltbox Olive is about the connections of the past to the present and the conflict between the simple truths we desperately crave, and life’s complex realities.
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Scar Tissue
$18.95Perhaps more than any other relationship or identity, motherhood is both organic and constructed. Mothers are created by their children, and then simultaneously expanded and abbreviated by maternity as a social category. In Scar Tissue: Tracing Motherhood, Montreal writer and literary philosopher Sara Danièle Michaud brings her considerable intellectual scope to the impossible intimacy of this most primal human relationship. Intense and intertextual, the book draws as easily from Saint Augustine as from Sheila Heti, weaving a long essay that is both deeply personal and eloquently universal.
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Selma Burke
Winner of the Theatre BC Canadian Playwriting Competition, two Betty Mitchell Awards, and two Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards
Selma Burke: Carving a Sculptor’s Life is a flight of fancy based on the incredible life of Dr. Selma Hortense Burke, who lived from 1900 to 1995, approximately 49,932,000 minutes. Here, imagined, are ninety of them, in a play that asks, “Who gets to make art, and who gets to destroy it?”
African American sculptor Selma Burke chronicled many of the extraordinary and devastating events of the past century in her outstanding work: lynchings, the Harlem Renaissance, the Holocaust, the assassination of Martin Luther King. Understanding that it is always easier to rip things down than build them up, Burke persisted in artmaking in the face of a society that didn’t always recognize her talents, a husband who demolished her work, and a government who stole it.
Cast of 1 Black woman, 1 white woman, 1 Black man, and 1 white man
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Semi-Detached
$24.95Hearts may freeze or thaw, but love never dies.
In December 2013, an ice storm buries Toronto as realtor Laura Keys prepares to sell a one-of-a-kind house on behalf of its comatose owner. Haunting Laura, and longing to be invited in, is a mysterious teenage girl with a Scottish terrier tucked into her coat.
As Laura readies the house for showing, she learns more about its owner, Edna “Eddie” Ferguson. Leading up to the Great Snowstorm of 1944, Eddie, a brickmaker, enters into a passionate yet ill-fated affair with her boss’s daughter. While uncovering the past, Laura navigates both the death of her mother and a troubled marriage straining under the weight of her infertility.
Across two paralyzing winter storms, set nearly seventy years apart and connected by a house and a murder, Semi-Detached contends with living after loss, love, and the meaning of home.
Insightful and evocative, emotionally intelligent and propulsive, this is a novel from a writer at the top of her game.
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Send Me Into the Woods Alone
$20.95Dispatches from modern motherhood by a reluctant suburbanite.
Send Me Into The Woods Alone is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood.
These essays touch on the major milestones of raising children, from giving birth (and having approximately a million hands in your vagina) and taking your beautiful newborn home (and feeling like you’ve stolen your baby from the hospital), to lying to kids about the Tooth Fairy and mastering the subtle art of beating children at board games. Plus the pitfalls of online culture and the #winemom phenomenon, and the unattainable expectations placed on mothers today.
Written from the perspective of an always tired, often anxious, and reluctant suburbanite who is doing her damn best, these essays articulate one woman’s experience in order to help mothers of all kinds process the wildly variable, deeply different ways in which being a mom changes our lives.
“Easily the most validating book you’ll read this year.”—Ann Douglas, author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books
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She Ran
$26.95Through the lens of a tragic 1975 murder and a piercing critique of media narratives, Ann Rauhala brings intimate partner violence out of the shadows.
Almost every other day, a woman in Canada is murdered by her partner. Domestic violence kills as many as 187 women each year while terrorizing or maiming untold thousands, including children and bystanders. Gender-related homicide of women and girls rose by 14 percent between 2020 and 2021, reaching its highest level since 2017. It is the most predictable category of murder, and yet too few of us know how this happens or how insidiously it affects everyone.
Part memoir, part investigative journalism, She Ran: The Media and the Public Response to Domestic Violence explores how news media have helped perpetuate or correct myths surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV). Challenging the idea that IPV is simply an “isolated incident,” author and journalist Ann Rauhala highlights its reality as a widespread crisis, making the case that the media — and the public — can and should help lead the way in prevention.
Rauhala reviews her experiences as an editor and women’s issues reporter for The Globe and Mail, her responsibilities as a journalism professor, her circumstances as a survivor of IPV, and her grief over the loss of her best friend. Dissecting media and public misconceptions, failures in legal and economic systems, and stigmas about IPV, Rauhala offers a vital perspective that calls for deeper awareness, wider accountability, and greater public commitment to confront this violence.
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Ship Moms
$24.95Lust, love, and pregnancy—hidden from the luxury and leisure of cruise ships are the beautiful, complicated, true stories of crew members and the babies they brought into the world.
The lives of cruise-ship crew members don’t stop when they are below deck. Ship Moms is a collection of behind-the scenes-stories about the relationships that bloom between crew members and all the wonderful mixed-nationality babies being brought into the world as a result, representing nearly forty countries and ten cruise lines. Here are the stories of these ship moms—stories of their strength, their endurance, and their tenacity in making it work against all odds. Beautiful and complicated, heartwarming and heart-wrenching, this collection spills the dirt on the ship life experience, telling real-life stories about connections that result in real-life babies.
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Shut Up You’re Pretty
$17.95CANADA READS RUNNER-UP, 2024
Winner, Trillium Book Award and Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Finalist, Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
In Tea Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.
Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.
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Skin
$25.00Winner, Foreword INDIES SILVER Book of the Year (Short Stories)
Now, for the first time, a blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
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Slice the Water
$26.00Longlisted, Canada Reads
Born on the lush island nation of Mahana, Fred lives under the tyrannical rule of a book-burning king. Under the king’s rule, Mahanians are controlled by a military dictatorship and threatened with forced starvation, while people with disabilities are exiled. After Fred’s father suddenly disappears, Fred joins an underground movement of dissenters and becomes an unwitting global icon in the fight for Mahanian freedom. When he is recruited and relocated by an organization that appears sympathetic to Fred’s cause, he arrives in a seemingly peaceful foreign nation, where the impact of social media and technology creates a new, stranger struggle.
A dystopian thriller, a work of speculative fiction, and a coming-of-age story, Wong’s novel thrums with biting bursts of staccato-like prose — a fitting accompaniment to a fascinating exploration of contrasting political systems. As Fred unpeels layers of truth and sees beyond the optics of altruism and the illusion of choice, Slice the Water unpacks the myriad amplifying impacts of technology, addiction, and complacency.
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Something That Helps
$24.95From acclaimed Norwegian writer Mona Høvring comes an intimate and stirring coming-of-age and sexual awakening story of a young woman following her own path to destruction and reconciliation.
Laura is in her late teens, living in a small coastal town in Western Norway, the summer before her final year of school. Haunted by the death of her mother by suicide, she has a strained relationship with her fisherman father and feels the absence of her brother and closest friend, both of whom have moved away. Equal parts lonely and bewildered, a lack of guidance has made her independent, determined, and vulnerable.
When Laura meets the older, more experienced Vivian Koller, the encounter sets in motion a series of events that will come to define her and her future. Crucial influences converge, pushing the simultaneously childish and adult protagonist into dark places—and eventually toward the start of a new life.
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Starry Starry Night
$24.95Finalist for the 2025 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Multicultural Fiction
From celebrated writer Shani Mootoo comes an innovative and revelatory work of autofiction about family secrets, trauma, race, class, and loss.
In Starry Starry Night, Mootoo gives us the singular voice of Anju Ghoshal, a young girl living in 1960s Trinidad. Through Anju’s innocent and clear-eyed observations, the reader becomes both a witness to and a participant in her negotiations of an unexpectedly new and complex life, spanning from the ages of four to twelve.
Set against the backdrop of a politically exciting time in Trinidad’s history, just before and after it gained independence, we meet Anju’s beloved Ma and Pa and her socially advancing family. While preoccupied with their own dramas, the adults around her often fail to recognize the needs of the children who depend on them.
Beautifully crafted and rich with sumptuous detail, this unique narrative coalesces into a portrait of a child who, despite her privileged appearance, must ultimately fend for herself because her safety depends on it.
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Stolen Sisters
$19.95Stolen Sisters is a first-of-its-kind play that gives voice to the lives and legacies of three Beothuk women and girls whose names have survived in historical record.
These are stories that have been mis-told, misrepresented, and mythologized by colonial interference. By shifting the lens of history to reflect Indigenous perspective and experience, the women brought to life in Stolen Sisters set the record straight, telling their own stories with both humour and unflinching honestly. Based on the oral and written Indigenous histories of colonization locally and worldwide, the voices of Stolen Sisters shine a light on the global experience of Indigenous women and girls and, in particular, Newfoundland’s part in that legacy.
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Taking Down Names
$24.95In a darkly humorous and thrilling exploration of vengeance and grief, a journalist must unravel a tangled web of mysterious deaths amidst her own personal tragedy.
In the aftermath of her sister Mia’s untimely death, journalist Jacky Careen struggles to find meaning in both her life and her work reporting on local news. As Jacky’s grief consumes her, dark karmic parallels begin to emerge in her increasingly desperate investigations into local crimes, all dismissed by police as “unfortunate accidents.” At first, Jacky believes only she notices these coincidences, but as the deaths continue, Jacky must confront the story unravelling before her . . . and possibly her own mental unravelling.
With her job and friendships on the line, Jacky risks it all to find justice for Mia—and to try and mend her broken heart.
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Tales of the Mountains and the Sea
$22.95Genre-bending and tinged with myth and folklore, these haunting debut stories centre young women at significant points in Lebanese history.
A teenage girl mourns the death of her grandmother, only to feel her grandmother’s spirit possessing her in a way that seems malicious. A family, struggling to make ends meet, receives an unexpected visitor, who has an awful proposal that may be impossible to refuse. A young girl worries that her brother is falling in with the wrong crowd, as civil war breaks out on the streets around them.
The five stories in Tales of the Mountains and the Sea trace pivotal movements in modern Lebanese history and the effects they have on women. As she centres women and the choices that they make, Dania Idriss deftly weaves together history and folktales in a way that is both evocative and chilling. The Tales of the Mountains and the Sea is a startling and astonishing debut that navigates the intricate nuances of human experience, cultural identity, family history, and the lasting impacts of war.
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That’s Where You Were, Then
$22.95Jen begins life as a solitary and somewhat diabolical child growing up in a rural Nova Scotia, who comes up with – at best – unusual ways of dealing with an annoying baby brother, a depressed mother, a disappearing father, and frogs that should be toads. Through the linked stories of this collection, we follow Jen from the dilapidated and overstuffed house of her childhood to her adult life in Calgary as an addictions counselor, each story introducing a new dimension of her mystifying, wry, occasionally heartbreaking, and often funny journey through life. In prose rich in characterization and insight, That’s Where You Were, Then explores the places we’ve been and the baffling absurdities we encounter along the way.