Mother’s Day Listicle!
We have books for every occasion and today we want to highlight what to read this Mother’s Day! We’ve put together a list of fiction and non-fiction titles. These books range from mystery, female solitude, suffering, resilience, storytelling and ancestral relations.
We’ve Been Here Before by Myrtle Henry Sodhi (releases May 12, 2026)
For readers of Homegoing and Frying Plantain, a stirring intergenerational saga stretching from the Caribbean to Canada where womanhood and mothering demands what the body wants to forget.
Woven together with folklore and memory, We’ve Been Here Before begins with the childhood stories of Lise-Rose, who struggles with speech and coming of age in a community anchored in both West African spirituality and the Catholic Church. Lise-Rose must choose either to follow the ancestral ways of her father, who is spiritually bound to the sea, or her mother, who has rooted herself in Catholicism. The path of her life changes, however, after an encounter with a shape-shifting figure from the village.
Like Lise-Rose’s ancestors, her descendants struggle to honour ancestral knowledge while living on foreign lands. Margaux, Lise-Rose’s great-granddaughter, embarks on a new life with her mother in Canada. Facing racism and isolation, they attempt to establish roots in a country that seems both limitless and oppressive.
Across generations, Sodhi explores how a woman reclaims a connection to her stories and ancestors while forging her own voice.
Women Among Monuments by Kasia Van Schaik
A lyrical meditation on the enduring obstacles women artists and writers face in a world still unaccustomed to recognizing female genius.
What does it take for a woman to don the mantle of genius — a title long reserved for male artists? From her studies in Montreal to a dead-end job in Berlin, a midnight tour of Paris, a bankrupt art residency on the Toronto Islands, and a mysterious sculpture garden in the Karoo desert, South African—Canadian author and professor Kasia Van Schaik considers what it means for a young woman to call herself an artist and claim a creative life.
Drawing on a diverse web of literary and cultural sources and artistic icons — from Georgia O’Keeffe to Ana Mendieta, Gertrude Stein to Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Marmon Silko to Bernadette Mayer — Women Among Monuments asks, What, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for female genius? Where does the inner flint of artistic permission come from? What is the oxygen that keeps it burning?
In her memoir interwoven with incisive biographies of female solitude, constraint, and perseverance, Van Schaik blazes a trail for more inclusive artmaking practices, communities, and monuments.
Opposite Sully’s Gym by Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson
A missing tenant, an irate mother-in-law, and a killer hiding in a Toronto rooming house — out-of-work PI Patrick Bird is back in business.
Patrick Bird thought he was helping his mother-in-law collect back rent from a deadbeat tenant at her Ossington Avenue rooming house, not starting a new investigation. But when he discovers Jack Turner’s third-floor darkroom is demolished and the photographer is missing, the other tenants come under scrutiny: Mr. Yusuf, the international student training to be a doctor; Danny Blinken, the shifty taxi driver; and Shirley Burton, the young nurse far from home.
As Bird investigates, he uncovers information about a former tenant, James Earl Ray, who had assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks earlier and had been hiding out in a room on the second floor.
The case takes Bird and the police down a path of intrigue reaching right into the centre of one of the most infamous assassinations of the twentieth century, leading our truculent PI to just about the toughest spot he could imagine.
Becalming by Aga Maksimowska
Gosia feels stalled in her life, but a family trip opens her eyes to the life she has … and the life she wants.
Gosia, a high school chemistry teacher, travels to her native Poland to visit her estranged father. Back in Canada, meanwhile, her father-in-law — who has been more of a dad to her than her own — is dying of cancer. Away from her routine, Gosia questions everything in her life, including her long-term boyfriend, Peter. She feels stuck in the terrifying time of early adulthood, in her first grown-up job while managing student debt, monogamy, and existential dread. Is this really it, she wonders?
Gosia’s time in Poland gives her the chance to examine her life, and she finds herself pulled homeward to Canada, where she faces the fact that Peter’s father — like her own — is far from perfect. Can she love despite betrayal? Can she find hope in her fiery, complex love for Peter? Is there something more to this life that she didn’t even realize she had?
Becalming tells the story of two people realizing that happily ever after is not something to be but something to continue to explore, through adversity and outrage, tragedy and inspiration, and love.
The Great Canadian Bucket List by Robin Esrock
Fully revised with new destinations to explore, renowned travel personality Robin Esrock curates Canada’s most unique and memorable experiences.
Having reported from over 120 countries on seven continents, award-winning travel journalist Robin Esrock has spent decades chasing the extraordinary. In the latest, fully updated edition of his bestselling book, Robin journeys to every province and territory to reveal the inspiring activities and destinations one must do — and can only do — in Canada.
Get ready to:
- feel the hot breath of a polar bear
- sail in the Galápagos of the North
- backcountry horseback ride in the Rockies
- hike the East Coast and West Coast Trails
- ice canoe across the St. Lawrence River
- taste the world’s most memorable cocktail
- cruise across the Northwest Passage
- float in Canada’s very own Dead Sea
- and much more …
With his trademark storytelling, humour, and curiosity, Robin Esrock celebrates Canadian travel experiences that are absolutely unique, instantly memorable, wholly inspirational, and waiting to be discovered.
Will Power by Susan Goldenberg
The most astonishing and extraordinary bequests and last requests found in people's wills.
“This will is uncommon and capricious.” As beginnings go, this opening line shows how our final words don’t need to be written in standard legalese but can instead be creative and individualistic. Will Power tells the stories of big names and ordinary people writing their last wills and testaments who did just that.
There’s the eccentric will that left a mansion and its grounds to a parrot. Developers could do nothing until it died — and parrots have long lives. There are cautionary tales of family conflict, including the one-page will fought over for two decades by three generations. Want to write a parting shot? Read about the will that mocked the beneficiaries, such as the bequest that said, “For my sister because she is married to a ministerwho (God help him) she hen pecks.” Or the contested will that ordered the deceased’s horses to be killed by a police firing squad; the bigoted will that bequeathed everything to a neo-Nazi organization; and the will that left far more money to sons than daughters, sparking a landmark gender discrimination case.
These stories and many more will amuse, entertain, and inform — for your consideration when you write or revise your will.
I Survived ISIS by Roza Alomar with Sean Steel
In this memoir of survival, a former captive of Daesh shares the empowering resilience of the Yazidi.
Roza Alomar is a young woman from northern Iraq, where she once lived a peaceful life with her family in the mountainside community of Shingal. When she was only ten years old, Daesh (ISIS) descended upon the Yazidi community with deadly, genocidal intent.
Roza’s grandfather was shot dead for helping diverse community members cope with the terrifying invasion; soon after this, her father was taken, and is presumed murdered, along with many of her other relatives. Towns, villages, temples, schools, hospitals, and farms were all plundered and destroyed. A systematic campaign was unleashed upon Yazidi people not only to mass murder and enslave them, but to eradicate all trace of their religion, customs, identity, and way of life.
Roza endured these terrible events alongside her mother, her five siblings, her aunts, and many cousins. After multiple attempts to escape, finally she found safety in Calgary, Canada, where she was able to attend high school and tell her story.
This is her own harrowing tale of suffering, resilience, courage, and overcoming unspeakable obstacles on the way to freedom.
I Don’t Do Disability And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself by Adelle Purdham
A raw and intimate portrait of family, love, life, relationships, and disability parenting through the eyes of a mother to a daughter with Down syndrome.
With the arrival of her daughter with Down syndrome, Adelle Purdham began unpacking a lifetime of her own ableism.
In a society where people with disabilities remain largely invisible, what does it mean to parent such a child? And simultaneously, what does it mean as a mother, a writer, and a woman to truly be seen?
The candid essays in I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself glimmer with humanity and passion, and explore ideas of motherhood, disability, and worth. Purdham delves into grief, rage, injustice, privilege, female friendship, marriage, and desire in a voice that is loudly empathetic, unapologetic, and true. While examining the dichotomies inside of herself, she leads us to consider the flaws in society, showing us the beauty, resilience, chaos, and wild within us all.
After The Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
A daughter’s search for her mother reveals her family’s past in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.
Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in Toronto one luminous summer morning in the mid-1980s. Her daughter, Rita, knows her mother has a history of dissociation and memory problems, which have led her to wander off before. But never has she stayed away so long. Unconvinced the police are taking the case seriously, Rita begins to carry out her own investigation. In the course of searching for her mom, she is forced to confront a labyrinth of secrets surrounding the family’s internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War, their postwar immigration to Toronto, and the father she has never known.
Epic in scope, intimate in style, After the Bloom blurs between the present and the ever-present past, beautifully depicting one family’s struggle to face the darker side of its history and find some form of redemption.