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Bird Shadows is a playful tale of eccentricities, misconceptions, and misogyny. While working on a personal spiritual project, an irreverent artist encourages her religious sister to rethink the marriage that seems to be killing her soul.The people in the quaint little Bay of Fundy fishing village of Brood Bay will not soon forget the events of 1995. It was an outrage! A good Christian family was torn apart by the wicked influence of a mentally unbalanced, morally challenged artist. Pastor Wallace was appalled by the improper, if not downright evil, behaviour that had taken place right under his nose. His sympathies were most certainly with the abandoned husband, Warren, deacon of the church, generous and innocent man of God. But was Warren as innocent as he appeared?Not according to his sister-in-law, Rube. She had always seen through the posing and the praying, As Rube sifted through her dreams, panning for God, her sister, Helen, was forced to acknowledge that her fundamentalist husband was not very Godly.

From the moment she holds her baby niece, Rose is on a mission. Terrified that her baby niece will fall victim to the sexual abuse rampant in the family, Rose tells us in her own warm, funny, down-to-earth voice, how she reluctantly agrees to join a therapy group, hoping she can find out how to prevent disaster and see that baby Jenny grows up unharmed. In the group, she meets new friends who will become like family: Josie, who "sees" the future; Tammy, with a suspicious bruise on her neck; good and steady Marg, whose father is threatening to burn down her apartment house; and sweet, grieving, spiritual Sally. Rose's own chronic problem, she confesses, is picking wrong men. Josie finds a small magazine picture of a little town in northern Ontario. She sees, with her second sight, a resort hotel to be built in this town and a sunnier life for the group. As they begin to take the first painful steps of emotional recovery, an intense fantasy about this unknown town and dream hotel becomes the secret life of the group. Deep friendships evolve as the women help one another through the roller coasters of their recovery process. Despite setbacks, they cling to their dream of moving up north and running their own hotel.

Winner, 2021 IPPY Bronze Medal for Canada-East Best Regional Fiction.Precocious ten-year-old Vanessa Dudley-Morris knows lots of secrets. In 1949 when she and her family are forced to move into two rooms on the second floor of 519 Jarvis Street in Toronto, a genteel but somewhat rundown rooming house owned by a reclusive pianist, she learns a lot more.Despite the family's drastically reduced circumstances, her parents struggle to keep up their old standards. Threatened by blindness due to an eye condition, Vanessa is kept at home, tutored by an erratic succession of eccentrics, some with questionable credentials. Consequently, she spends a lot of time alone, wandering the dim corridors of the old house, silently listening at doors and watching the odd characters who live there. She becomes fascinated by a mother and son who move into a room on the third floor. Eventually she agrees to take secret notes from the son to his mysterious friend at her church, unwittingly unleashing a chain of events that leads to tragedy.

What if you made the worst mistake of your life and got the chance to fix it? Only you made it so much worse? From the incomparable crafter of nine cross-genre works of fiction, Lisa deNikolits expands her horizons to pen a grab-you-by-the-throat, feminist speculative-fiction thriller in the style of Groundhog Day meets The Matrix.The perfect father kills his family on Christmas Eve, and tries to undo his actions by jumping back in time. The result is murder and mayhem in dystopia. Set in 2055, the world is run by robots and virtual data, while the weather is controlled by satellite dishes. Arts and culture are no more than distant memories. People are angry, placated by prescribed visits to rage rooms to vent their boredom, fury, and discontent. Beneath the sunny skies and behind the garbage-free suburban McMansions live deeply disturbed, materialistic families. During his time travels and increasingly desperate attempts to reserve his colossal mistake, Sharps Barkley meets the leader of the Eden Collective, a feminist army determined tosave the Earth by removing all artificial intelligence and letting the Earth restore itself--if necessary, at the expense of mankind. The Eden Collective uses data gathered from the rage rooms to analyze and predict the potential and actions needed for the Earth to reset andthey need to prove that time travel is an effective tool. If Sharps can go back and save his children, then there is hope for the future. Sharps is the 49th experiment and his success is pivotal. Can love prevail over anger?The Rage Room has a multi-layered plot that is fueled by a feminist-driven courage to take charge and save the world as it exposes the effects of an increasingly digital age on our lives and, ultimately, our humanity.

Finalist, 2021 High Plains Book Award for Short StoriesDear Hearts is a collection of character-driven stories that are whimsical, sometimes magical, unsentimental yet poignant, and focus on the ways in which girls and women who were teenagers in the 1960s experienced the changing cultural values shaped by feminism. Many of them are about the experiences of young women in high school and university, and explore their response to changing sexual mores. The characters are hearts of longing caught in the irony of the times, transitioning from the sixties right up to the present. Stories are presented in five parts: Tender Hearts, Geneva Stories, Surreal Hearts, Janet Stories and Sorry Hearts and reveal characters with a sense of longing and poignancy yet strength and quirkiness, too.

Underneath the Water with the Fishis a collection of short fiction that explores the murky underwater existence of women's uncensored thoughts and desires. Often the women are on the cusp of change: death, leaving a relationship, starting a new one, wondering how they got to the point where they are. Sometimes they are living a rather marginal existence or are not well grounded in sound mental health and are just getting by. The author tells these stories with a touch of poetry and of humour and a great deal of emotional intelligence.

In these stories seers and vagabonds, addicts and gardeners succeed and sometimes fail at creating new kinds of community against apocalyptic backdrops. They build gardens in the ruins, transport seeds and songs from one world to another and from dreams to waking life. Where do you plant a seed someone gave you in a dream? How do you build a world more free of trauma when it's all you've ever known? Sometimes the seed you wake up holding in your hand is the seed of a new world.

Winner, 2020 National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Literary Award; Overall Winner, 2020 Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Award; Winner, 2021 IPPY Gold Medal for Urban Fiction; Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year AwardsFeatured on Ms. Magazine's June 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us and Bustle's 23 Debut Books That Are Too Good To Ignore. It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place. Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi's dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world, while trying to hold onto his marriage. Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.Tensions rise as the demolition date moves closer, plans for gentrification are laid out, and the pace of suspicious fires picks up. The residents find themselves at odds with a political system manipulating their lives and question the future of their relationships.The Talking Drum explores intra-racial, class, and cross-cultural tensions, along with the meaning of community and belonging. Examining the profound impact gentrification has on people in many neighborhoods, and the way in which being uprooted affects the fabric of their families, friendships, and emotional well-being, the novel not only focuses on the immigrant experience, but the way in which the immigrant/African American neighborhood interface leads to friction and tension. This book thus provides a springboard to important discussions on race and class differences, on the treatment of immigrants, as well as the government's relationship and responsibility to society.

When British immigrant Selena Jones marries Aidan Gilmor, a Sinhalese-Eurasian -- part British -- from Sri Lanka in the 1960s in Toronto, a passionate clash of culture ensues. Selena's mother in Wales is horrified when Selena brings Aidan home to Wales for the wedding. Back in Toronto, Selena faces further prejudice and disapproval of her "mixed marriage," despite Pierre Elliott Trudeau's new "multiculturalism," which was being encouraged but also resented. She is shocked not only by the reaction of neighbours but by the teachers at the all-White school in Toronto where she teaches, and she pretends that Aidan is a White Canadian. When two poor West Indian and two East Indian children from a new government housing project nearby unexpectedly arrive at the school, Selena is forced to take a stand in their defence. Gradually she learns to face her fears and confront racism. She is drawn into a deeper understanding of her Sri Lankan family, and especially of her father-in-law, a former tea planter under the British, who left Ceylon after Independence in 1956. She sees the effect of colonialism on Aidan and his family, trying to be "British" while caught in the middle of the civil war conflict in Sri Lanka. The revelation of her father-in-law's secret guilt about the past leads to an inevitable and shocking climax.

The House of Izieu is a novel inspired by the life and experiences of Sabine Zlatin who, as a Jew using a fake identity, managed to find families to care for Jewish children who were in French refugee camps. She created a safe home for a number of other children called "The House of Izieu" which is now a museum. Unfortunately, she was not able to save the 44 children in her care. After one wonderful year of freedom in that house they were discovered, and Klaus Barbie ordered their deportation to Auschwitz where they were killed. Sabine's husband was also caught with two teenage boys he was helping escape and was also eventually killed. Sabine, suffering from loss and the guilt of not having saved the children, manages to continue contributing to the underground efforts as well as efforts to reunite people after the war's end.

Set in the mid-1930s, Filthy Sugar tells the story of Wanda Whittle, a nineteen-year-old dreamer who models fur coats in an uptown department store, but who lives in a crowded rooming house with her hard-working widowed mother and shrewd older sister, Evelyn, in the "slums" behind the city's marketplace; a world where "death is always close but life is stubborn." Bored with the daily grind and still in shock from the sudden death of her father, Wanda finds both escapism and inspiration in the celluloid fantasies of the Busby Berkeley musicals, Greta Garbo dramas, and Jean Harlow sex comedies. Strutting up and down the aisles of Blondell's department store, her peep-toe high heels drumming out a steady beat on the waxed linoleum floors, Wanda fantasizes that she's Ruby Keeler, the tap dancing sweetheart from 42nd Street. But Wanda wants more than to wear a glamourous woman's coat--she wants to live inside of her flesh. Her dreams come true after a chance encounter with the mysterious Mr. Manchester, proprietor of the Apple Bottom burlesque theatre. Suddenly Wanda is thrust into a world of glitter and grit. Descending from the rickety, splintered roof top of the Apple Bottom theatre on a red velvet swing, Wanda Whittle morphs into a dream named Wanda Wiggles; sweeter than a strawberry sundae and tastier than a deep dish apple pie. At the Apple Bottom she meets Lili Belle, a naughty cartoon flapper brought to life; Queenie, a sultry headliner whom Wanda feels drawn to like a bee to a butterfly bush; the sweet and salty Eddie, a drummer who thumps out his words like bullets from a machine gun and Brock Baxter, the Apple Bottom's vaudevillian comic whose apple cheeked, pretty boy exterior belies his sinister intentions. All will have an impact on Wanda's journey. Cowardly boxers, shady coppers, dime store hoodlums, and painted ladies--Wanda will encounter them all! On her voyage from rags to riches and back again, Wanda experiences a sexual awakening and achieves personal independence as she discovers that a girl doesn't need a lot of sugar to be sensational!

Winner of the 2020 International Book Award for LGBTQ Fiction; Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year AwardsMargot Wright has led a deliberate life. At 18, she left her unusual and abusive family situation and never looked back, and then two years later she devoted herself wholly to Estelle Coté, her first and only love. But now, at 45, freshly retired from a career in antique firearms dealing, and settling into a new home with her wife, Margot finds herself feeling restless. Bored. She admits this to herself on the day she visits Le Galopant, a historic carousel that has become bafflingly meaningful to Estelle; and, as with anyone wishing to dodge a midlife crisis, Margot sets her feelings aside, intending to ignore them for as long as possible. At La Ronde, the amusement park where Le Galopant is showcased, Margot is accosted by a 17-year-old girl named Katherine de Wilde. Katy is hyper and unrefined, "rural," everything Margot cannot stand, yet she finds herself thinking more and more about the lisping girl in the Converse sneakers and "Meat is Murder" T-shirt as the days tread on. Even after Estelle discovers a massive secret she's been keeping for a decade, forces her into couples counseling and then on a road trip to confront this secret, Margot is unable to stop Katy from seeping into her thoughts. So when Katy phones her one morning with bad news, "They're taking down Le Galopant for good. It's broken!" Margot yields to impulse and pursues her interest in the girl. Set between Montreal, Quebec and various American cities, Carousel is a story about secrets--secret yearnings, lives, and losses--and the measures we take to protect our loved ones from the monsters we see ourselves to be.

Gathering together powerful voices of feminist writers, peace activists, and matriarchal studies scholars from around the globe, The Legacy of Mothers reconceptualizes mothers, motherhood, and mothering as an alternative human logic to create a new sociopolitical order. The contributors draw on ancient knowledges, Indigenous perspectives, and African traditions like Motherism to argue for the reordering of our world according to a distinctly transformative feminism. The book then explores where this new logic is already taking root, demonstrating that a better world is not just possible but already evolving./p

Releasing Hope was born out of the first book Arresting Hope, which describes participatory health research and the experience of women incarcerated inside a British Columbian provincial correctional centre from 2005 to 2007. Readers of Arresting Hope, moved by the stories written by incarcerated women, asked, "What happened next?" And, "How are the women doing, now that they are released from prison?" Starting in 2007, women who were released from prison formed a network called Women in2 Healing because they wished to continue participatory health research in the community. Their overarching research question was, "How can we improve the health of women in prison and following their release?" Releasing Hope describes the journeys of formerly incarcerated women and their encounters with the barriers (financial, emotional, familial, systemic) that they confronted during their reintegration in the community. Releasing Hope touches on the stories of individual women and the learning from participatory health research that made visible their lives, their hopes, their dreams and fears.

Blue Bear Woman is the first novel written by an Indigenous woman that was published in Quebec in the French language. The story of a young Cree woman's search for her roots and identity, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau's debut novel, Ourse bleue, was originally published in 2007, and is her second novel to be translated into English. The novel explores contemporary Indigenous life and the impact on the Cree of the building of the Eastmain dam in northern Quebec, posited as "virgin" territory, yet which has actually been part of the Cree traditional territory since time immemorial. In search of her roots, Victoria takes a trip to the country of her Cree ancestors with her companion, Daniel. It is a long journey to the north along the shores of James Bay. Colours, smells, and majestic landscapes arouse memories that soon devolve into strange and hauntings dreams at night. In bits and pieces, uncles, aunties, and cousins arrive to tell the story of Victoria's family and bring with them images of her childhood that are tinged both with joy and sadness. Guided by her totem, the Blue Bear, she returns home to make peace with her soul, as well as release the soul of her Great-Uncle George, a hunter who has been missing in the forest for over twenty years.

Lorato lives a comfortable but lonely life in her retirement years, alone in the home her husband had built in their rural village on the Kalahari in southern Africa. She becomes a grandmother when she adopts Lesedi after the death of a neighbour from HIV-related causes. Then six more children come into Lorato's care, four of whom are biological grandchildren, two more are adopted. Now primary caregiver for seven grandchildren, she struggles to feed them all, to teach them right from wrong, and traditional ways of life in a world shifting and modernizing. We see how AIDS as well as cultural changes disrupt traditional life when Lorato's son dies of the disease.

Finalist for the 2019 Foreword Indie Award for General Fiction.Upon the death of their art-loving parents, thirteen and fourteen year old Jewish sisters are kidnapped by a family friend and taken to a brothel. There they are held captive by their shared shame and by the younger sister's forced addiction to morphine. Love and psychodrama gives them the courage to finally escape Vienna. Once in England, however, Hedy discovers her younger sister Susannah longs to be independent-- and in Italy. But in 1938, despite the safety they each have found among the privileged, they return to Vienna just before Hitler arrives, putting their own lives and those of two children in danger. With the background of anti-Semitism and exploitation, of sex and love and art and dramatic ruses, all during the terrifying rise of fascism in Austria and Italy, Look After Her reveals this truth: no matter how close we are to another human being, even a beloved sister, that's what we are: close-- we all have our own secrets to keep.

After dealing with the grizzly murder of a sexual assault victim near her cottage in Huntsville, Ontario, Robin MacFarland, the feisty Home and Garden reporter for a major Toronto paper, feels she must go elsewhere for a peaceful family holiday. She, her cop boyfriend Ralph, and her adult kids, travel to the beautiful long sand beaches on the South Shore of Nova Scotia for a few weeks in August. She continues to tussle hilariously with her weight, drinking, feelings towards her boyfriend, and spiritually while coping with a dry well in the cottage she's rented, systemic racism issues in the local population, and escalating anger towards the fish farms dotted along the shore which are destroying the lobster industry. A sensational murder of a local politician coupled with the "accidental" death of the owner of the fish farms captures her interest. When she mentions the situation to her editor at the Toronto Express, her best friend Cindy, a crime reporter at the paper, is dispatched to cover the story. Again, Robin finds herself in the position of convincing everyone that the accidental death was no accident, that the two deaths are intertwined, and that the murder weapon is extremely ironic.

A Harsh and Private Beauty, is about the life and loves of Ruby Grace, now in her 89th year, on a train journey with her granddaughter back to Chicago, the city of her birth. When the book opens, Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby's grandparent's immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny's life in 1920s Chicago--the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition--and Ruby's subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto. Headstrong and talented, Ruby struggled with the conventions of the times, was trapped in a marriage that forced her to give up her singing career, and in love with another man who shares her passion for music. Now, on the train headed back to a city she cannot remember, to a daughter she hardly knows, Ruby tries to look honestly at herself and the choices she has made, choices that affected not only her children, but her grandchildren. Ruby has a stroke on route, leaving the disconnected story of her life and love in the hands of her granddaughter, Lisa, who must reveal a secret to her father, Ruby's son, that her grandmother guarded all her life.

What do a corpse, a painter, two smugglers, a clever ghost, a green parrot, a fashion show and a bank robbery have in common? Set in present-day Central America, a talkative parrot witnesses a crime; friendly spirits chaperone, shape, and direct their fellow characters in criminal pursuits, in romantic liaisons and in business endeavours, allowing them to make amends, and to right some of the wrongs of history through actions reminiscent of legendary Robin Hood. Simon Patrick, an artist, re-locates in Costa Rica. He inherits a parrot, Don Verde, once a drug mule for Marco Alvarez who has left behind the body of his wife, Isabella, in the well. But this is not a run-of-the-mill smuggler, nor is Isabella a passive ghost. What follows is a terrific tale of friendship, thievery, haunting, and finally redemption.

To pursue her dream of building a life free from violence for her son and herself, Yalda flees from her nightmarish past as well as her troubled homeland, Iran. But in her new haven, she realizes that nightmares haunt not only her past, but also her present and future. She does what she can to survive, but all her plans dissolve like the shadows and ghosts that follow her. Having fled from an authoritarian regime, and now living in a North America panic-stricken by global terrorism, Yalda is obsessed with all the forms and aspects of violence. She is estranged from her beloved son, Nader, who trains to become an armed security guard, and this means he is wearing a uniform and carrying weapons, prepared to be violent. She cannot forget that her first love was shot and killed by a young prison guard and that her beloved stepbrother also met a violent death. This family history is a wound that makes guns taboo and Yalda yearns to feel safe in a troubled world. The novel is part memory, part dream, and part present, day-to-day struggles for immigrants living in Toronto and Montreal.

The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution is about a couple experiencing a mid-life crisis. The husband loses his job as editor of a financial magazine. Neither are happy with their aging bodies. He seems to have gotten by with charm and frozen emotions. The wife has no idea how angry she is with him for his detachment. It is her idea to sell the house and just travel. But he is not coping well with retirement, so he simply walks off a ferry in Australia and leaves her. He steals a cat (well, he steals an expensive SUV that happens to have a cat onboard) and he flees Sydney, ending up in Apollo Bay, a few hours south-west of Melbourne, where he falls in with a group of anarchists and punk rockers in a tattoo parlour, planning revolution. Meanwhile, the wife sits tight in Sydney with no idea of where her husband might be or what happened. She moves into the red-light Kings Cross area, befriending the owner of the hostel, a seventy-year-old ex-cop drag queen from Saint John, New Brunswick, and waits to hear from her husband. When she learns that her husband is fine, consumed by wrath, she invokes the angry spirit of an evil nurse, a key player in the terrible Chelmsworth sleep therapy in which many patients died (historical fact). While Lyndon gets in touch with his original career ambition to become an artist and wrestles with anarchism and capitalism, Margaux gets in touch with her rage and meets people who can help her deal with it. A serio-comedic thriller about a post-retirement couple who embark on an unintentionally life-changing around-the-world adventure, The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution is about the meaning of life, healing from old wounds, romantic love at all ages, and how with love and passion, we can make a difference, at any age.

Finalist for the 2020 International Book Award for Multicultural Fiction.In 1858, the British took over the city of Lucknow, paving the way for Queen Victoria's reign over India. But what happened to Begam Hazrat Mahal, the woman of African-Indian descent who had valiantly organized a final key resistance to British rule, and to her ex-husband, Wajid 'Ali Shah, the last King in India, who remained imprisoned by the British? The Envy of Paradise tells their stories.Jocelyn Cullity's English family lived in India for five generations. A sequel to the award-winning Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons, her second novel about the takeover of India by Britain is an exquisitely told tale of 19th-century India -- a deep rendering of the moment that India as a country was colonized; a brilliant illustration of Hazrat Mahal's fearless character and the depths of betrayal the last King in India faced.

Both charming and powerful, this memoir unfolds the story of a young girl born in Iran who eventually triumphs over sexism and abuse to become a successful woman and mother in Canada. The book opens with a dramatic account of a terrible accident that leaves a young child with burn scars all over her chest. This scarring has a profound effect on the girl's life. Yet, despite this accident, the narrator's childhood is rich and blessed in many ways. The family circle is extensive and the relationships, especially with the wonderful Baba (her father) and her spirited cousin Fereshteh, are both protective and complex. The narrator travels from Qazvin, an ancient capital of the Persian Empire, to remote mountain villages, to the glittering capital of Tehran with its cafés, dance clubs, fancy boutiques and lush parks, to a villa on the Caspian Sea, as well as to the "tin town" of Halaby Abad in Southern Tehran and to the rice paddies where women do backbreaking work for next to nothing in wages. In doing so, she deftly handles a minefield of politics, from the regime of the Shah to the foreign interests of British and Americans, to street marches and protests, to the installation of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. A beloved uncle is murdered by the Revolutionary Guards and the narrator's own marriage to a man of the Bahai faith is illegal. Sexual politics and women's rights are addressed throughout the memoir from the Persian custom of khastegari, to the stripping of women's rights under the Islamic Republic to domestic abuse in Canada.

Winner of the 2020 International Book Award for Multicultural Fiction; Winner of the 2020 Ippy Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction.It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. "You should've been born a boy," Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world. As she grows, Adele learns there are certain rules Lebanese girls must follow in order to be good daughters. First off, they must learn to cook, master housework, learn Arabic and follow the traditions of their culture. Above all, they must save themselves for marriage. But Adele dreams of being an artist. When she is accepted to the University of Toronto, this is her chance to have a life outside the confines of her strict upbringing. But can she defy her father?When Youssef surprises her with a family trip to her ancestral home, Adele is excited about the journey. In Lebanon, she meets Elias. He is handsome and intelligent and Adele develops feelings for him until Elias confides to her that her unexpected meeting with him was actually a well-devised plan that is both deceitful and shocking.Will this unravel the binding threads of this close-knit Lebanese family? Crisscrossing between Ottawa, Toronto and Lebanon, The Allspice Bath is a bold story about the cultural gap and the immigrant experience.