Reading List: 7 books by women to pick up this fall
From Métis tales to a story told through Amelia Earhart’s love letters, the team at Upstart and Crow selects engrossing titles to put at the top of your list
THIS TIME OF year is both easier and harder than usual for a bookseller. Easier because, as the chill creeps in, people pick up books to go with their blankets, and bookstores across the Northern hemisphere see an influx of traffic. Harder because there are just so many strong titles releasing during this season that it’s difficult to know where to begin with recommendations. One way to see our way through the maze is to sort by category, so this month we’re featuring books by women that should be top of your pile.
The Care We Dream Of, by Zena Sharman (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Canada’s health-care system (indeed, much of the world’s) has been under a microscope since the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is another important analysis of our essential services that is often underlooked: How we can ensure care is safe and accessible for all genders and sexual orientations? Writer, speaker, and LGBTQ2SIA+ health-care advocate Zena Sharman begins to answer that by interweaving essays with stories, poetry, and non-fiction contributions from writers such as Alexander McClelland, jaye simpson, Jillian Christmas, Kai Cheng Thom, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. This book needs to exist, and it needs to be read.
Letters to Amelia, by Lindsay Zier-Vogel (Bookhug Press)
This is a book about love, loss, and intergenerational female relationships, all told through letters written to Amelia Earhart… and those of Earhart to her lover. Its depth and ingenuity will make you marvel that it’s a debut work, albeit from a beloved writer in Canada and the mind behind the internationally acclaimed Love Lettering Project.
Matrix, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
So beloved is Lauren Groff since Fates and Furies released in 2016 that it’s easy to overlook her latest work in roundups such as these, presuming that this literary event will be known to all. But despite Matrix being longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction and already a New York Times bestseller, people aren’t talking about it everywhere… yet. Captivating, thrilling, heartbreaking, and epic, this novel explores the life of a 17-year-old nun in the 12th century, who has found herself in an abbey after being cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine. Such harsh circumstances offer explorations of faith, of love, of rapture in this exquisite work.
The Greater Good, by Madeleine Shaw (Wonderwell)
Madeleine Shaw has built multiple businesses based on social-enterprise values—before they were fashionable. One such venture is Aisle (previously Lunapads), which seeks to reduce period poverty, and waste, with reusable menstrual products. Her message to other women in her new book, The Greater Good, is an important one as we begin to look at economic recovery in the pandemic: do what you love, don’t reserve the word “entrepreneur” for other people, and know the difference you can make as a result. Shaw wrote the book for “everyday people who want to change the world.” And don’t we need more of us right now?
A Dream of a Woman, by Casey Plett (Arsenal Pulp Press)
This collection of short stories has been long awaited by CanLit fans and booksellers alike, after Casey Plett’s novel, Little Fish, won multiple awards including a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award. A Dream of a Woman continues the spree, being longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. This intimate, quietly revelatory, transportive work centres transgender women in a series of story meditations on sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love.
Second Place, by Rachel Cusk (HarperCollins)
This latest work from acclaimed Outline trilogy author Rachel Cusk isn’t new for the season; it launched just before summer this year. But this truly remarkable novel hasn’t been snatched up as quickly as we expected—and we want that to change. Those who have already read Cusk know that every sentence is immaculate. Every chapter ends with a line that makes you exhale with admiration and recognition. Second Place is no different—a literary, almost claustrophobic exploration of what happens when a middle-aged woman asks a painter she admires to spend a summer in their holiday home. This is a highlight of 2021.
Stories of Métis Women: Tales My Kookum Told Me, by Bailey Oster, Marilyn Lizee and Audrey Poitras (Durville Publications)
The Métis women featured in these stories, the publisher explains, are known by many names: Otipemisiwak, “the people who own ourselves”; Bois-Brûlés, “Burnt Wood”; Apeetogosan, “half brother”, by the Cree; “half-breed”, historically. Known, too, as “rebels” and “traitors to Canada”, they are also called the “Forgotten People.” This collection shares stories about the Métis in both English and Michif—now an endangered language. The subtitle, Tales my Kookum Told Me, summarizes the intergenerational connectivity of these stories and celebrates what this is at its heart: a deeper understanding of the experiences of daughters, mothers, aunties, and grandmothers of the Métis Nation.
And no matter what time of the year it is, and in whatever language, it’s never a bad time to read women’s stories. Especially those told to us by Kookums.
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