Thanks Mom: Ten Books for Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, May 11, 2025. In celebration of this special day, we’ve assembled a list of ten books that provide insight into the complex and varied experiences of motherhood.
We’re also hosting a 25% off sale from May 7-11, 2025. Looking for a gift for mom? We believe there’s no better gift than a new book! So, this Mother’s Day, treat mom or the mama figures in your life with the gift of quiet reading! They deserve it.
It’s important to note that Mother’s Day can be complicated for many people for various reasons. If Mother’s Day is difficult for you, we encourage you to prioritize your well-being and be kind to yourself. Do what feels best for you and remember that your feelings are valid.
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood by Adrienne Gruber
Documenting the birth and early life of her three daughters, Adrienne Gruber shares what it really means to use one’s body to bring another life into the world and the lasting ramifications of that act on both parent and child. Each piece peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations.
The Fun Times Brigade by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
The Fun Times Brigade examines the enduring challenges of reconciling being an artist with being a mother. It is also a timely reflection on forgiveness and what it really means to have a good life in a world that demands we have—and be—it all, and asserts that amidst the chaos, we can find our way back to our genuine selves.
My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith
My Work is a fervent, intimate, and compulsive examination of the relationship between motherhood, writing, and everyday life. In a mesmerizing, propulsive blend of prose, poetry, journal entries, and letters, Olga Ravn probes the pain, postpartum depression, housework, shopping, mundanity, and anxiety of motherhood, all the while celebrating the unbounded that comes from the love in a parent and child relationship—and rediscovering oneself through art.
Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận, translated by Nguyễn An Lý
A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house there and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft. Following the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her mother’s past and begins to investigate and track a mysterious figure who emerges from her notebook named Paul Polotsky. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris as he goes about his usual routines. Meanwhile, she zigzags across France and Asia, trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable.
Barbara by Joni Murphy
Barbara is born just before World War II to a tragically beautiful mother and a father who becomes an engineer in the famous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her mother dies by suicide. These realities of war and personal loss shape her consciousness going forward. She grows up to become an actress, restlessly travelling the world between film sets and love affairs, from the Bronx to Athens, the Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Navigating decades and genres, Barbara moves from austere 1950s kitchen sink dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics. She takes on and sheds many roles, temporarily becoming a vampire’s victim and a stylish mistress, a martyred saint and a bored housewife. She enjoys clandestine sexual encounters and endures an illegal abortion; she marries, divorces, and remarries, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be her great love.
Not Even the Sound of a River by Hélène Dorion, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Not Even the Sound of a River is a moving tale of love’s phantom pains as shared through the relationships between three generations of mothers and daughters. Hanna drives down the St. Lawrence River to her late mother’s hometown, hoping to find out more about the distant woman who began to reveal herself only through notebooks discovered in her effects. As the river widens, so does Hanna’s understanding of the matriarchs in her family. She learns that her mother’s one true love, Antoine, died on the St. Lawrence when she was twenty, and that her grandmother also lost a young love to the same water. Both women remained shipwrecked after these tragedies, their tales mirroring other survivors’—such as the few who did not perish in the Empress of Ireland sinking when more than a thousand people lost their lives on the river in 1914.
These Songs I Know By Heart by Erin Brubacher
Married and divorced in her 20s, looking for friendship in her 30s, and contemplating pregnancy at 40, our narrator wonders if she’s going through life out of order. But Alice, The Turtle, The Kid, and other beloveds show her that motherhood is more than giving birth, art is never finished, and love is not linear. Through a three-day canoe trip, chance encounters, fierce female friendship, step-parenting, IVF, pandemic isolation, and quiet moments between humans, These Songs I Know By Heart weaves vignettes of everyday mythology into an absorbing and honest meditation on the connections in our lives. With razor-sharp reflection, humour, and most of all love, we are reminded that there’s no formula to life and that instead, we must celebrate what makes the small moments of our lives extraordinary.
How You Were Born by Kate Cayley
A young mother intrudes into the life of an older woman, thinking she knows what’s best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbours. A man enables his cousin’s predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters fail despite their best intentions and continue on despite their failures. The stories in How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life—whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century—Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.
Toxemia by Christine McNair
With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts.
As the Andes Disappeared by Caroline Dawson, translated by Anita Ananda
Caroline is seven years old when her family flees Pinochet’s regime, leaving Chile for Montreal on Christmas Eve, 1986. She fears Santa won’t find them on the plane but wakes to find a new doll at her side, her mother preserving the holiday even amidst persecution and turmoil. This symbol of care is repeated throughout their relocation as her parents work tirelessly to provide the family with a new vision of the future. Once in Canada, Caroline accompanies her parents as they clean banks at night. She experiences racist microaggressions at school, discovers Québécois popular culture, and explores her love of reading and writing in French. Slowly, the Andean peaks disappear from Caroline’s drawings and a fracture between her parents’ identity and her own begins to grow.
