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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 97–110 of 110 results
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The Unravelling of Ou
$21.95Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and eventually, untangle herself from her dependence on it and reconnect with the people she loves.
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The Wax Child
$24.95Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize
From the internationally celebrated author of The Employees and My Work comes an extraordinary, haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution.
In seventeenth-century Denmark, unmarried noblewoman Christenze Kruckow and several other women are accused of witchcraft. They are rumoured to be possessed by the Devil, who comes to them in the form of a tall, headless man and gives them dark powers. It is said they perform unchristian acts and can steal people’s happiness, cause pestilence, illness, or even death. And once the rumour of witchcraft takes hold, they are all in danger of the stake.
Narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze one dark night in 1620, The Wax Child is an unsettling, dizzying horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of pre-modern Europe.
Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of infamous witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland. Full of lush, vivid storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources, such as letters, court documents, magic spells, and Scandinavian grimoires.
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Two Days in Mayaro
$25.00A new collection of stories of the Jamaican diaspora by acclaimed poet and storyteller Pamela Mordecai. Mordecai combines old time stories with the contemporary and showcases the struggles, triumphs, and humour of diaspora life, creating a world powered by unforgettable characters in language that sings.
The characters in Two Days in Mayaro cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, home and belonging, reckoning with both their present and past. Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. A man in a nursing home looks back on two days on a beach with his then-wife and children and the lost chance of happiness.
In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh. This is a world alive with sound, infused by lore, ancestry, and history.
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Until They Sleep
$25.00Frona is convinced she’s the most sinful person in her Greek mountain village. When her parents arrange her marriage with a distant stranger, she is determined to suppress her impulses and become a dutiful wife and mother. But things don’t go as planned: A furious fetus, a friend’s secret wish, a man finding new life in an empty well, a lecherous priest, an unorthodox wandering daughter, invading soldiers, and a wayward ghost attempting reparations all erode the stories Frona has been telling herself about what it means to be a good person. A darkly comedic fairy tale with a magical feminist bent, Until They Sleep confronts the horrors of a world that tries to narrowly define womanhood and sexuality.
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Vidal
$30.00Part Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Danila Botha’s powerful debut graphic novel follows young Vidal who grows up in Tiberias (Ottoman Empire and then British Mandate Palestine) and moves to Paris to pursue his art and freedom and gets trapped there during World War II. Danila Botha traces the steps of Vidal’s life through Chagallian vignettes, from his Sephardic upbringing in Tiberias to studies in the Technion in Haifa, his artistic life in Paris, his work with the underground resistance, and his ultimate arrest and time in Auschwitz.
Poignantly capturing the Sephardic Jewish experience, and like Vidal and his family, the author’s family were fifth generation Moroccan Jews who grew up speaking both Hebrew and Arabic and coexisting with their neighbours and friends.
A rich artistic and cultural experience, Vidal brings to light the untold stories of family, hope, freedom, and what their pursuit can cost. Vidal reminds us all that it’s possible for things to be different.
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We Oughta Know
$24.95A lively collection of essays that re-examines the extraordinary legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated ’90s music and changed the industry forever
Fully revised and updated, with a foreword by Vivek Shraya
“A fascinating, fun, and infuriating read.” — Tegan Quin, Tegan and Sara
In this of-the-moment essay collection, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner explores the ways in which Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan became bonafide global superstars while revolutionizing ’90s music. In an era when male-fronted musical acts dominated radio and were given serious critical consideration, these four women were reduced, mocked, and disparaged by the media and became pop culture jokes, even as their albums were topping the charts and demolishing sales records.
With empathy, humor, and reflections on her own teenaged perceptions of Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah, Andrea offers us a revised and expanded edition of her 2015 book, providing a new perspective on the legacies of the four Canadian women who dominated the ’90s airwaves and influenced an entire generation of current day popstars with their voices, fashion, and advocacy. As the world is now reconsidering the treatment and reputations of key women in ’90s entertainment, We Oughta Know is definitively entering the chat.
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Weather Diviner
$24.95Set in a tragic, transformative year in an extraordinary place with larger-than-life characters, The Weather Diviner is a story of self-discovery—not just for one young woman, but for Newfoundland itself.
It’s 1942. With polished boots and bulging wallets, the Americans have come to defend a highly strategic location—Newfoundland: the Allies’ new transatlantic transportation hub. Like thousands of others chasing new opportunities, Violet Morgen abandons her remote outport home and heads to St. John’s. An amateur forecaster with a powerful sixth sense for the island’s tempestuous winds and weather, Violet is determined to help the Americans fight the enemy. But determination, it turns out, is not enough.
Carefully-researched and -crafted, entertaining, and informative, The Weather Diviner is a heart-felt tale in which friends make a difference, weather makes for interesting conversation, and opportunity comes to those who dare to dream.
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Welcome to Sunny Town
$24.95In this striking debut novel, a young artist rashly moves overseas to teach ESL and to find herself, and gets more – and less – than she bargained for.
Feeling like her life is falling apart, a young artist named Maggie follows a classmate abroad, with a goal to reinvent herself. In Japan, she is welcomed by a community of irresistibly compelling expats, and quickly becomes enmeshed in their circle of friendships and dramas.
Despite having no real qualifications, Maggie easily gets a job teaching English at Language Love Academy. There she meets Keiko, an overenthusiastic, middle-aged student who challenges Maggie’s often-faltering efforts. When Keiko offers to teach Maggie Japanese, Maggie gets a glimpse of a different side of the country.
Did Maggie and her new friends come to Japan to find themselves – or to disappear? Are their friendships and relationships real, or just another illusion? Maggie can’t tell whether she is sinking deeper into her hapless life overseas or gaining a foothold on a real future for herself.
Welcome to Sunny Town is a riveting debut novel that cracks open a popular rite of passage and the worldwide ESL industry. Bringing to mind the work of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, and Melissa Broder, Théodora Armstrong paints a deft portrait of twentysomethings at the turn of the twenty-first century, yearning for identity, connection, and the courage to begin again.
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welík’t
$24.95A multilingual collection by emerging Indigenous poet Kalli Van Stone combines Salish languages with English and revitalizes ancestral traditions.
Interdisciplinary artist Kalli Van Stone embraces syilx and Secwépemc language in these sparse yet potent poems. welík’t—which means “sparkle” in the Secwepemctsín language—captures the story, song and dance which help heal the ongoing intergenerational impacts of colonialism and the residential school, day school and current education systems.
The structure of Interior Salish music and its healing powers are alive in many of Van Stone’s poems. The collection itself is framed in three sections for each language—nsyilxcn, Secwepemctsín and English—and translations accompany each piece.
With the poet’s artwork interspersed throughout the pages, welík’t is a rich celebration of creativity and coalescence.
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Where the Eff is My Red Tent?
$26.00Where the Eff is My Red Tent is a visceral, unflinching memoir-in-essays about what happens when a person grows up believing their suffering is just part of life.
For decades, Heather Hendrie lived in a body and mind she couldn’t quite trust. Each month, like clockwork, a storm rolled in—one of despair, self-doubt, and disconnection. Doctors dismissed it. Culture normalized it. She believed it was her fault. It wasn’t.
Told with startling clarity and lyrical precision, Where the Eff is My Red Tent traces Hendrie’s journey through the unspoken, misunderstood world of PMDD—Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. Part medical mystery, part feminist reckoning, and part love letter to anyone who has ever felt “broken,” Hendrie unearths the systemic silencing of menstruating people and shines a light on a condition that affects 1 in 20 people with cycles—yet remains dangerously underdiagnosed.
From panic attacks in the backcountry to therapy sessions in snowstorms, Hendrie—a wilderness therapist and clinical counsellor—writes with deep compassion and sharp insight about what it means to heal in a culture that gaslights and mistrusts what’s commonly seen as “women’s pain.”
A love letter to anyone who has ever felt hijacked by their hormones, misdiagnosed by the medical system, or alone in their suffering, this book is a lighthouse. Unapologetically honest and quietly revolutionary, Where the Eff is My Red Tent is not just a story of one woman’s diagnosis—it’s a call to listen to our bodies, name our truths, and reclaim space for stories we’ve been told to keep quiet.
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Whispering Gallery
$22.95Experimental visual and prose poems that reimagine Greco-Roman mythology through a feminist lens.
The poems in Whispering Gallery explore the tensions between analog and digital poetics, language, and materiality. Each poem, first typed on a typewriter and then digitally manipulated, is named for a female or feminine figure (wives, daughters, monsters, mothers, muses) stalled, subdued, or caught in moments of suspension rather than heroic resolution. Paired prose poems translate these mythic figures into contemporary, intimate registers, tracing the quiet violences, care, and survival that shape lived experience.
Drawing on personal and domestic ephemera (thread, spice, old print artifacts), the collection explores repetition, distortion, and persistence as formal and thematic tools. Equal parts intimate diary, scholarly engagement, and playful experimentation, Whispering Gallery offers myth as a site of shared vulnerability, radical care, and connection.
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Windfall
$26.95The fascinating true story of Viola MacMillan and the scandal that transformed the Toronto Stock Exchange
Viola MacMillan had it all: success, money, respect … and even influence. But in 1964, after three decades in the mining industry, one of the most fascinating women in Canadian business history was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals.
MacMillan was a prospector who’d gone on to put together big deals, develop lucrative mines, and head a major industry association — all at a time when career women were a rarity. But she still dreamed of “a major discovery.” Early in July 1964, shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off. In the absence of any information about what Windfall had found on its claims near Timmins, rumours and greed pushed the share price to a high of $5.70. MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally, after three weeks of market frenzy, Windfall admitted it had nothing. When the stock crashed, so many small investors lost money that the Ontario government appointed a royal commission to examine what had happened. Meaningful changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission followed.
Windfall: Viola MacMillan and Her Notorious Mining Scandal is biographical history at its finest: the unlikely story of a trailblazer who, although convicted and imprisoned, would later receive the Order of Canada.
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Women, Walking
$25.95An anthology about moving through the world on foot – as a woman.
Women, Walking explores the broad spectrum of women’s experiences and perspectives on walking, from everyday strolls that let the mind breathe to ambitious journeys that test courage and resolve.
Co-edited by Zahra Ebrahim and Jane Farrow, this anthology features thirty vignettes, essays, graphic art, poems, and interviews, with contributors discussing identity, love, social connection, grief, and wonder. They each take us on a different path, but share common ground in highlighting the deep significance to be found in an ordinary walk.
The contributors come from all walks of life; among them are Jenny Odell, Miriam Toews, Andrea Gibson, Zalika Reid-Benta, Janika Oza, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Catherine Hernandez. Whether they take you on a meander or a hike, a parade or a promenade, they all offer relatable and insightful reflections on walking to lose yourself, find yourself, and everything in between.
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Write Back Now!
$22.95Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishman’s debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they don’t. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real.