A person reading a book.
A person reading a book. Credit: Blaz Photo / Unsplash Credit: Blaz Photo / Unsplash

The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society

By Christine Estima

Published in November 2023, Christine Estima’s debut novel The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society is a collection of short stories that follows a family through centuries as generations move across the globe, encountering adventure, hardship, humanity, and more. 

Estima’s ability to weave the tales of women together across time—from the family’s roots in the Middle East to where they eventually settle in Montreal, culminating with the story of Azurée—has been called “transformative,” “gorgeous and gutting,” and a “precise prose [with a] sharp eye for human complexity.” 

The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society also dedicates as much attention to the environments characters find themselves in as to the characters, bringing each story entirely to life. To delve into the “deep roots of the Arab immigrant experience,” order directly from House of Anansi Press.

Becoming a Matriarch 

By Helen Knott 

Activist, social worker, spoken-word poet, and author Helen Knott is back with the follow up to her 2019 debut novel In My Own Moccasins, welcoming readers into her life for “an honest and open” look into the realities of love, loss, and legacy. 

Becoming a Matriarch begins with Knott’s reflections on birth, including her own and those of her younger brother and son, then transitions into a larger conversation about what it means to be an Indigenous woman. Knott shows how each generation of women are connected to those who came before and those who have yet to come through the uplifting care they have always practiced. 

Knott bears all using humour, wonderfully descriptive language, and strong storytelling to impart just how much she learned from the Dane Zaa First Nation—of which she is a part—and ultimately why painful journeys lead to a moment of “becoming.” 

River Mumma

By Zalika Reid-Benta

An important addition to your shelf if you enjoy the magical realism of Salman Rushdie or Toni Morrison is River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta. The young Torontonian’s highly anticipated debut novel follows Alicia, who, during her quarter-life crisis, is chosen by the Jamaican water deity River Mumma to find the deity’s lost comb. 

What ensues is a perilous journey across Toronto, filled with malevolent spirits like duppies and rolling calves, that ultimately becomes a journey of self discovery. Reid-Benta explores what it means to be Jamaican-Canadian—pulling from her own experiences at times—and centres the importance of ancestral ties in the contemporary context while keeping her readers deeply engaged with Jamaican folklore. 

Reid-Benta’s openness and creativity is bound to enthrall, so pick up a copy of River Mumma the next time you see it. 

On Community

By Casey Plett

Another debut on rabble’s radar is Casey Plett’s On Community, a longform essay that examines what community means, how different communities have evolved, and how communities impact the lived experiences of their members. For Plett and many of the readers who have connected with her work, the significance of community and the meaning of the word itself is nothing to be taken lightly. In fact, misunderstanding community can be dangerous. 

Plett draws on her experiences as a member of different communities like the Mennonites and transgender literature, “hacker dens in Silicon Valley,” and rising nationalism to question the meaning of “community,” lay out its pitfalls and peaks, and call out the power that “community, as a word, an idea, and a symbol,” holds. 

On Community is a deeply researched, vivid, and at times difficult essay to work through—primarily because of the questions Plett asks—but absolutely essential today in a world where we are losing the true meaning of community.

Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty, and the Violence of Social Assistance

By Idil Abdillahi

Grounded in extensive research and written by a long-time activist and scholar, Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty, and the Violence of Social Assistance shines a light on the surveillance Black women experienced, and continue to experience, when on Ontario Works—the province’s social assistance program. Idil Abdillahi makes clear a purposefully opaque connection between social systems and the carceral state and how this connection has been used to reinforce systems of violence. 

Abdillahi collected testimonies from 20 Black women in Toronto who find themselves at the intersection of surveillance, poverty, and social assistance, then examined the testimonies using Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought to show abolition’s reverberating impacts. What’s more, Abdillahi drove home the “interconnectedness of Black women’s experience globally.”
To secure your copy, order directly from Arp Books.

A photo of Madison Edward-Wright.

Madison Edward-Wright

Based in Montreal, QC, Edward-Wright discovered her love for journalism while completing her undergraduate degree at McGill University. Her work has appeared in The Tribune and she will be featured in...