15 Canadian books to read on International Women's Day
March 8 is International Women's Day. Here are 15 Canadian books by women writers you should read in 2023.
Ducks by Kate Beaton
Ducks is an autobiographical graphic novel that recounts author Kate Beaton's time spent working in the Alberta oil sands. With the goal of paying off her student loans, Kate leaves her tight-knit seaside Nova Scotia community and heads west, where she encounters harsh realities, including the everyday trauma that no one discusses.
Kate Beaton is a cartoonist from Nova Scotia who launched her career by publishing the comic strip Hark! A Vagrant online. The sassy historical webcomic gained a following of 500,000 monthly visitors and was eventually turned into a bestselling book. Beaton's success continued with the book Step Aside, Pops, which won the 2016 Eisner Award for best humour publication. Beaton has also published two children's books, King Baby and The Princess and the Pony.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Pure Colour follows a woman named Mira, who leaves home for school and meets a person named Annie. Annie has this power over Mira and opens her chest like a portal. Many years later when Mira is older, her father dies and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But when photosynthesis gets boring, Mira must choose whether or not to return to Annie and the human world she has left behind. Pure Colour is a funny exploration of the wonderful and terrible aspects of being alive.
Pure Colour won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian playwright and author whose work has been translated in over a dozen languages. Her novel Motherhood was on the shortlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is also the author of the novels Ticknor and How Should a Person Be? and the self-help book The Chairs Are Where the People Go.
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
In the horror novel Motherthing, Abby Lamb is finally putting the darkness from her childhood to rest after meeting her wonderful husband Ralph. But when they move in with Ralph's mother Laura, Laura's depression and cruel ways start to weigh on Abby. After Laura takes her own life, her ghost haunts them and Abby must make the ultimate sacrifice to save her family.
Ainslie Hogarth is an author from Windsor. She has published two YA horror novels, The Lonely and The Boy Meets Girl Massacre, and her short fiction has appeared in Hazlitt, Black Static and elsewhere.
Junie by Chelene Knight
Junie is a novel about Junie, a creative and observant child, who moves to Hogan's Alley in the 1930s with her mother. Hogan's Alley is a thriving Black immigrant community in Vancouver's east end and Junie quickly makes meaningful relationships. As she moves into adulthood, Junie explores her artistic talents and sexuality, but her mother sinks further into alcoholism and the thriving neighbourhood once filled with potential begins to change.
Chelene Knight is a writer and poet from Vancouver. She is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, which won the 2018 Vancouver Book Award.
Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley
In this collection of essays, actor, screenwriter and director Sarah Polley reflects on the pieces of her life and the fallibility of memory. From stage fright to high risk childbirth, Polley contemplates these events and how she remembers them. In struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, she must retrain her mind to find a new path forward. Run Towards the Danger is a book about learning, changing and what it's like to live in one's body.
Polley is an Oscar-nominated Canadian actor, screenwriter and director. Her first feature-length film, Away from Her, was adapted from the Alice Munro story The Bear Came Over the Mountain and was nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Her other films include Stories We Tell and Take This Waltz.
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a novel that recounts a Tibetan family's struggle to create new lives of dignity, love and hope after China's invasion of Tibet in the 1950s. Readers follow sisters Lhamo and Tenkyi on a multi-decade journey through exile, from a harrowing trek across the Himalayas to a refugee camp on the border of Nepal. Decades later, the sisters are separated. Tenyki lives in Toronto with Lhamo's daughter Dolma, who has to decide if it's worth risking her dreams to help her community.
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies was shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Tsering Yangzom Lama is a Tibetan Canadian author based in Vancouver. Born and raised in Nepal, she's also lived in Toronto and New York City. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is her debut novel. Lama was named a writer to watch by CBC Books in 2022.
Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew
When Lily was a child, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family and was never heard from again. After becoming a new mother herself, Lily is obsessed with discovering what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls growing up in a British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families and how Swee Hua longed to return to Brunei. Eventually, a clue leads Lily to southeast Asia to find out the truth about her mother. Dandelion is a novel about family secrets, migration, isolation, motherhood and mental illness.
Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a lawyer and law professor based in Ottawa. Dandelion is her first novel and won her the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop.
Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Fayne is about Charlotte Bell, a young woman growing up in the 19th century. She lives at Fayne House, a vast and lonely estate straddling the border between England and Scotland. When a mysterious artifact is found, Charlotte's passion for knowledge and adventure will take her to the bottom of family secrets — and to the heart of her own identity.
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a writer who lives between Toronto and Montreal. Her novels include Fall on Your Knees, The Way the Crow Flies, and Adult Onset. Fall on Your Knees was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a finalist for Canada Reads in 2010, when it was defended by Perdita Felicien. In addition to writing, she was the host of CBC's Doc Zone for eight years.
Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall
In 2017, Angela Creighton discovers a mysterious letter containing a confession in an old stack of mail. Determined to find the recipient, Angela's search takes her back to the 1970s when a group of women operated an underground abortion network in Toronto known by the code name: Jane. Weaving together the lives of three women, Looking for Jane is a story about the devastating consequences that come from a lack of choice and the enduring power of a mother's love.
Heather Marshall is a writer from Toronto, Ontario. Before turning her attention to storytelling, Marshall worked in politics and communications. Looking for Jane is her first novel.
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
Set shortly after the events of the Arab Spring, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is a novel that traces the relationship between two people — a wealthy Egyptian American woman and an unemployed man from the village of Shobrakheit — who meet in a cafe in Cairo. The pair fall in love but must contend with issues of identity, class and violence as they try to build a lasting relationship.
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English was shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Noor Naga is an Egyptian Canadian writer. She won the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for her poem The Mistress and the Ping. She also won the Disquiet Fiction Prize in 2019. In 2020, Noor was named a writer to watch by CBC Books. Her first book, the poetry collection Washes, Prays, was published in 2020. Noor is an instructor at the American University in Cairo.
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill
When Marie, the spoiled daughter of a sugar baron living in 19th-century Montreal, meets the brilliant Sadie, the two are immediately inseparable. Marie has bubbly charm and sees the pleasure of the world, whereas Sadie's obsession with darkness is all-consuming. Class and circumstance lead them down different paths, while each woman plays an unexpected role in the events that upend their city. When We Lost Our Heads is a story that explores gender, power, sex, desire, class and status.
Heather O'Neill is a writer and author from Montreal. O'Neill's debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, was a finalist for a Governor General's Literary Award and won Canada Reads 2007. The Montreal-based writer was the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize: her novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night was a finalist in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels was a finalist in 2015. Her latest books are the novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel and the nonfiction book Wisdom in Nonsense.
The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy
The Island of Forgetting is an intimate saga spanning four generations of one family who run a beachfront hotel. Starting in the 1960s and moving from Barbados to Canada, the story examines complex relationships, race, sexuality and the many ways a family's past can haunt its future.
Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian-Canadian writer based in Vancouver. She won the 2020 UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2017 CBC Short Story Prize. The Island of Forgetting is her debut novel.
Still Hopeful by Maude Barlow
Maude Barlow counters the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism and offers lessons of hope that she has learned from a lifetime of activism in the memoir Still Hopeful. Barlow has been involved in three major movements: second-wave feminism, the battle against free trade and globalization and the fight for water justice. She emphasizes that effective activism is about building a movement and finding like-minded people rather than making the goal the focus.
Barlow is a Canadian activist and writer. She is the bestselling author of 20 books and served as the senior water advisor to the UN General Assembly. Barlow was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right. She lives in Ottawa.
Kinauvit? by Norma Dunning
When Dr. Norma Dunning applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary program, seeking to confirm her identity as an Inuk woman, she was asked one question that would set her down a path to understand the history of Canadian bureaucracy. She was asked, "What was your disc number?" This question begged others, leading Dunning to conduct a series of heartfelt interviews with Inuit community members who experienced the Eskimo Identification Tag System. Kinauvit? examines the treatment experienced by the small Indigenous population in Canada at the hands of the Canadian government. Dunning provides a comprehensive look into this dehumanizing practice and shares the voices of those who, under this system, were only ever viewed as a number.
Dunning is an Inuk writer who currently lives in Edmonton. She wrote Tainna, which won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. She is also the author of the short story collection Annie Muktuk and Other Stories and the poetry collection Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity. Annie Muktuk and Other Stories won the 2018 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, which recognizes the best debut short story collection of the year.
LISTEN | Norma Dunning joins Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss Kinauvit?:
The Girl in the Middle by Anais Granofsky
Anais Granofsky is a Canadian woman of mixed Black American and Jewish heritage. Her parents met in the early 1970s: her father is the son of a very wealthy Toronto Jewish family; her mother is one of fifteen children from a poor Black Methodist family. The Girl in the Middle reveals how Granofsky is forced to navigate her way through issues of race, class and social standing. When she became a star on the TV series Degrassi Junior High, she came to a better understanding of her place in the world.
Granofsky is an actor, director, producer and writer. Best known for her role as Lucy Fernandez on Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, she has directed and starred in a number of films. She is also developing a fictional TV series loosely based on her childhood. The Girl in the Middle is Granofsky's first book.
LISTEN | Anais Granofsky reflects on her life and career:
