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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 81–96 of 110 results
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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.
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The Age of Silence
$34.95The Age of Silence is a family saga, antiwar tribute to mothers in war zones based on real events set in Baghdad during the Iraqi-Iranian War and the Gulf War. Living between the hammer and the anvil of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, with a son missing in battle and a huge fortune tearing her family apart, Bedria fights a battle in her own home that she cannot win. This story takes you behind the closed doors of a household in a war zone to tell how one mother struggles to keep her family together while confined by the silence the regime and culture imposed on her. It is about a tumultuous time in Iraq, money wars, siblings rivalry, ego, and a legacy of love and forgiveness that a mother left behind. This book is a tribute to the silent warriors in all war zones—the mothers.
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The Antique Picker’s Daughter
$24.95“The first thing you need to know: They’re not antiques.
The second thing you need to know: I’m not his daughter.”Life on the street in Toronto is hard, and with winter coming, it gets tougher. This is when Frankie first meets Francis, a man old enough to be her father. He starts training her in “the game,” as she comes to call it; buying or stealing collectibles and small antiques and reselling them at inflated prices. Through winter, spring, and early summer, the two become a team, traveling around small towns and villages in southern Ontario collecting the items Francis refers to as “inventory.”
But it turns out life on the road holds dangers Frankie can?t anticipate, and her precarious world tips into disaster when Francis abandons her in an unfamiliar town.
Betrayed, alone, and deserted, Frankie finds herself in a dangerous situation that will require all her skill and intelligence to survive. -
The Art of Getting Lost and Found
$24.95One hundred and thirty years apart, during the same week in August, two women separated by time struggle to regain their strength and find new hope on the shores of Sally’s Cove.
2017: Shortly after losing her children in an ugly divorce and custody battle, Maggie Breen’s mother passes away. The double loss leaves Maggie reeling and desperate to escape everyday life. Maggie’s never been east of Toronto, but she offers to return her parents’ ashes to their heart’s home—Newfoundland—and opts to leave her meds behind. As she sets out across the rugged landscape where her family’s roots run deep, the act of bringing her parents home is complicated by family secrets as the consequences of Maggie’s decisions catch up with her.
1887: For Susan Short, better known as Shorty, life in Newfoundland’s harsh Great Northern Peninsula runs a lot smoother for her and her six children when her husband Lorne is away. A good novel provides the escape she longs for, but reading is something Lorne has forbidden her and their daughters to do. When Lorne returns home and learns Shorty and her children have broken his rules, Shorty’s life is upended and she is forced into action to keep her children safe.
Fiction collides with Newfoundland legend in The Art of Getting Lost and Found as we follow two mothers fighting to regain resilience and hope, while getting lost and found in the town of Sally’s Cove.
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The Astonishing Lives of Older Women
$26.95A bold cultural manifesto for a generation of women, and a wake-up call we can’t afford to ignore.
There is a seismic shift underway in how we think about aging for women — and Moira Welsh is leading the conversation.
But beneath the glossy narrative of “aging well” lies a more complicated truth.
In The Astonishing Lives of Older Women, Welsh combines immersive reporting with unforgettable real-life stories to reveal what growing older actually looks like for a massive — and rapidly expanding — demographic of women.
You’ll meet:
- A woman in her 70s forced to live in her car
- A widow navigating love, rejection, and financial insecurity
- A lifelong professional quietly outliving her savings
These stories expose the hidden realities shaping women’s later years:
- The gender pension gap
- Rising housing insecurity
- Loneliness, ageism, and invisibility
- The financial cost of caregiving, divorce, and survival
But this isn’t just a diagnosis. It’s a guide to what comes next.
Drawing on insights from a CEO, a legal scholar, and a feminist economist, Welsh offers essential, clear-eyed advice on careers, pensions, financial planning, and relationships. It all underscores a critical truth: financial independence isn’t optional.
And yet, this is not a story of defeat.
As women live longer than ever before, many are redefining what those extra decades can mean: new love, deep friendships, sexual freedom, purpose, and power on their own terms.
Part urgent social investigation, part cultural manifesto, The Astonishing Lives of Older Women captures a pivotal moment — for a massive demographic of women, and for anyone rethinking aging, longevity, and the future of women’s lives.
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The Boys’ Club
Acclaimed Québec feminist Martine Delvaux turns her sharp eye and even sharper pen on the history of gentlemen’s clubs and male fraternity in this wide-reaching study of patriarchy. Delvaux lays bare the brazen misogyny of boys’ clubs across many fields, including politics, entertainment, technology, law enforcement, architecture, and the military. Examining popular media produced by men about men, The Boys’ Club exposes a culture of consumption which profits off female experiences while disregarding female voices.
The Boys’ Club is both an activist text and a work of cultural scholarship deeply informed by Delvaux’s long engagement with the work of feminist scholars, film critics, historians, writers, and journalists. Identifying a pattern of contempt, exclusion, and patriarchal violence, Delvaux names misogyny’s circular, self-propagating systems, undermining social, cultural, economic, and political mechanisms in order to break up the boys’ club.
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The Broken Heart of Winter
$24.95Lise, Appoline and Anne are related, though they live on opposite coasts at different moments of time, with the vast geography of Canada and decades of change in between. The three women are linked by generations of hardship, displacement, and an eighteenth-century French musket that has been passed down through the LeBlanc family since the time of the Acadian expulsion. In contemporary Victoria, BC, Lise’s estranged son, Daniel, reappears in Nova Scotia just when she’s making significant changes in her life, including a nasty divorce from Daniel’s father. Upon learning that her son is living with a distant relative Lise barely knows and causing enough trouble to draw the attention of the authorities, Lise goes to him and begins to unravel a family history that brings about unintended consequences. In 1832, on Isle Madame, Nova Scotia, eighteen-year-old Appoline is left by her older brother to overwinter in an isolated cove, where she’s in charge of five members of her family ranging in age from ten to ninety-nine. Grand-mère, the family matriarch, refuses to leave despite the wishes of her family. Tension grows between Appoline and her younger sister, coming to a head when the sister brings home a young ‘Jersey man.’ Finally, Grand-mère tells her own story of the Acadian expulsion of 1755. Her memories follow a group of Acadian fugitives on their flight into what is now northern New Brunswick, seeking refuge at the infamous Camp D’Espérance. In each successive generation, the imprint of the expulsion perpetuates further suffering, severs a connection to the past and contributes to the gradual erosion of cultural identity. Nevertheless, these three women are resilient in the face of great obstacles. The Broken Heart of Winter speaks to the capacity of the human spirit to love, to adapt, and to carry on.
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The Endless Garment
$18.00In a fresh and unique look at epic poetry, Marguerite Pigeon has created what may be a new classic. With equal parts love of the art form and social critique, Pigeon ranges over time and space in a series of long poems that delve into the history and impact of fashion. Guided, and haunted, by a series of ghosts, from Coco Chanel to Gypsy Rose Lee to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pigeon’s narrator moves through the floors of a grand existential department store, comprehending, reinventing and questioning her approach to, and understanding of, fashion. At times manic, at times surreal and always needle sharp, The Endless Garment is an extraordinary work of imagination that every reader will want to try on.
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The Fall-Down Effect
$24.95Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.
As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family—quick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.
At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblings—responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River—struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.
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The Golden Bracelet: A Memoir of Growing Up in 1930s Syria
$24.95Anahid Hagopian grew up in Aleppo, Syria, in the years leading up to the Second World
War. Her childhood was spent amidst civil unrest, conflict, and uncertainty, faced with challenges around education, identity, women?s rights, and family secrets, including her mother’s precarious and sometimes dangerous social position as a wealthy courtesan in French-occupied Syria.This is a story about the unbroken bond between mother and daughter, and the sacrifices made by one mother so that her daughter could achieve her education, which she always called her “golden bracelet of independence”.
This posthumous memoir is edited and annotated by Anahid’s daughter, Antonia Swann,
who promised her mother on her deathbed that she would share her story with the world. -
The Instrument Must Not Matter
$26.00She sees the score for the Bach-Brahms in her mind’s eye, hears the indigo notes unfurl.
In this sweeping coming-of-age novel gifted young classical pianist Lila Rys finds herself in New York City studying under famed teacher George Vrubel. The move from Toronto to the American city is terrifying, but Lila is determined to bring music back to the Rys family, where the story of her grandmother refusing to play Soviet music after their tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 is family lore. Accompanied by her brother, Lucas, who is studying at NYU, Lila struggles to navigate the classical musical world and become the successful performer she’s expected to be. But in New York she has a romantic encounter with a renegade pianist and everything she knows about herself is turned upside down, until her brother discovers dissident literature that holds the stories her grandmother had not passed on, and Lila learns how to set her love for her family, and her music, free.
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The Longest Night
$24.95A taut and uncanny thriller about one girl’s search for home, melding time travel, magic realism, horror, and literary suspense.
One forty-below December night, 18-year-old Ash Hayes finds herself locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota. She seeks shelter from the freezing cold and certain death at the closest house on the road, with neighbours she hasn’t yet met.
The next morning, everything is off-kilter – the neighbours’ house has no mirrors or modern technology, and all the windows blocked. When Ash tries to call her parents, their numbers are disconnected. One of the strange inhabitants there is a doctor, who offers Ash a terrible form of help and won’t take no for an answer. In her efforts to get out of the house and back to her regular life, though, Ash finds herself transported to an even stranger place and time, setting off a chain of events that connect with (and alter) her past and her future.
For fans of Mona Awad and Emily St. John Mandel, The Longest Night is a high-stakes, genre-twisting story about searching for something stable in a world where reality is ever-changing and can’t be trusted.
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The Seed
$14.95Notes on desire, reproduction, and grief, and how feminism doesn’t support women struggling to have children
In pop culture as much as in policy advocacy, the feminist movement has historically left infertile women out in the cold. This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups – where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation – leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility.
In the tradition of Eula Biss’s On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage – her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women’s right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.
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The Time of the Great Singing
$19.95A kinetic new poetry collection that sings our astonishment and our fear at how life makes and unmakes us through every love and every grief.
These poems are at once plangent and wise, fired by exacting observation of the changes that mark the natural world—the diminishing woods, the surging birdsong in spring–as well as each stage of human life. The poet struggles to understand what her experiences mean, even as a sudden turn—a mother’s illness, a father’s death—sweeps her in an entirely different direction.
Philips writes of “this borrowed ground,” our trespass on the earth none of us can own. In every movement of these poems as they flow over rough ground and smooth, there’s the thrill of discovery, and the echoing notes of what we can’t know, the mystery of changes yet to come.
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The Tinder Sonnets
$22.95From acclaimed writer Jennifer LoveGrove comes an electric poetry collection exploring female sexual desire, contemporary dating, misogyny, and middle age that reflects and embodies our social media-saturated times.
Unabashedly confessional and radically vulnerable, The Tinder Sonnets rallies against the long-standing demand that “women of a certain age” politely accept being rendered non-sexual. Each poem is based on a date, relationship, or contemporary dating insight, and highlights how misogyny impacts the way we connect in the modern world–or don’t.
Juxtaposing folklore and the natural world against the digital sphere of texting and dating apps, this is poetry that defies invisibility and instead confronts and subverts it through a discerning feminist lens. While experimenting with the traditional form of the sonnet, these sonically textured poems are playful and wry, erotic and joyful, all while refusing to shy away from palpable anger, frustration, and disappointment.
Centring strength and resilience in the face of a resurgence of misogynistic chauvinism, The Tinder Sonnets is a staunch refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, or to be quiet and polite.