A booklover’s guide to Peterborough’s bookstores: International Women’s Day

Smith performing with the Patti Smith Group, in Germany, 1978. Not just a musician, Smith is one of the authors recommended below.
Smith performing with the Patti Smith Group, in Germany, 1978. Not just a musician, Smith is one of the authors recommended below.

Mark Jokinen’s

Wander over to the Arabic Lit. section for Lebanese writer, Hanan al-Shaykh’s Women Of Sand And Myrrh ($10), while out in front in the $2 shelf you’ll find Alice Munro’s Open Secrets and an Atwood shortfiction collection Bluebeard’s Egg and the novel Bodily Harm.

Knotaknew

Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir about her relationship to artist, Robert Mapplethorp is on the carousel in the fiction section. On that same carousal look for South Korean novelist, Kyung Sook-Shin’s 2011 Man Asia award winning Please Look After Mom, about a missing mother and the role and meaning of motherhood in a rapidly transitioning society. Just above that you will find Wolf Hall ($9.50) by Hilary Mantel. In 2012 Mantel became the first woman two win two Booker prizes, the for which was for this piece of historical fiction following Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII.

Books And Things

New York born author, Julia Alvarez’s How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent ($9) is in the fiction shelf table in the front. In the CanLit section you’ll find Emily Carr’s journals Hundreds And Thousands: The Journals of An Artist.

Dixon’s

In Dixon’s Canlit section you’ll find Joy Kogawa’s The Rain Ascends for $4.95. Sitting right by the fiction section on the carousel you’ll see Alice Walker’s essay collection of 36 essays and articles In Search Of Our Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose $5.95. Finally in the fiction section watch out for Jamaican born, now Toronto-based author Olive Senior’s collection of short fiction Discerner Of Hearts, also $5.95.

Scholar’s

In the window sits Barbara Ehrenrich and Diedre English’s For Her Own Good: Two Centuries Of The Experts Advice For Women.

In the fiction section find No Crystal Stair ($7.95) by Mairuth Sarsfield. Having only recently passed away in 2013, this Canadian author, activist and journalist was the first black woman to sit on the board of directors of the CBC. No Crystal Stair, which was defended in the 2005 edition of Canada Reads and for which she won the first ever literary award presented by The National Congress Of Black Women’s Foundation, documents the struggles of black women in 1940’s Montreal to both find their own cultural identity while adopting the regalia of the larger white culture within the context of the deeply fluid and cosmopolitan atmosphere of its setting.

Thea’s

Tucked into the CanLit nook sit several copies of Myrna Kostash’s All Of Baba’s Children, a memoir/ethnographic history of three generations of Ukrainian-Canadians and the struggle of immigrant cultural minorities to assimilate into Canadian culture, and the diversity beneath surface was a best-seller in 1977 and a classic in Canadian social studies.