Mother Superior

By Saleema Nawaz

A prostitute takes shelter with a group of young anarchists. A sister goes missing, mailing a trail of encoded postcards from destinations across the globe. The daughters of a Montreal bagel-shop owner navigate the tricky terrain of being young, Sikh, and female, one growing larger while the other fades. A woman watches with lust and longing as the object of her affections, her pregnant roommate, is pursued by an unsavory suitor. And a precocious child spies on her adoptive mother, trying to grasp the secret of her mother’s hidden obsession and of her own unexplained origins. The seven stories and two novellas in Mother Superior are a heady blend of misfits and mothers, of sisters and complex, mysterious others. Nawaz traces the scars left by family secrets and sings the complex, captivating language of lust and of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781770480155

Saleema Nawaz

Saleema Nawaz is the author of the short story collection Mother Superior, which was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Best First Book Prize. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.