Demeter Press | Mothers, Daughters & Untamed Dragons

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 230

Publication Date: November 2012

ISBN: 978-1-927335-06-2

With rare literary exceptions to the contrary, mother-daughter relationships are often romanticized and idealized, and cosseted from stringent social analysis. In this insightful novel, Aysan Sev’er explores the love, caring, sacrifice, as well as the tensions and conflict, in mother-daughter relationships through the lives of four generations of women. The setting for the first generation is located within the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and the eventual birth of the Republic of Turkey. Reflected in the lives and prejudices of the earlier generations, history is a backdrop to the novel. The second generation of women stay in the Republic, while some members of the third generation settle in Canada. Over the geographical and cultural differences, mothers and daughters continue their often close, sometimes turbulent contact, while they grow into very dissimilar adults.

“At times forgiving, conflicted, judgmental, and generous in spirit, this book encapsulates—in the main character of Anna—the everyday lives of women’s relationships with oth- er women, and some incidental men, spanning generations and continents, and weaving together national and person- al histories. It is the central fractured relationship between mother and daughter in which the dragons in women are re- alized, expressed in maternal memories, regrets, recrimina- tions, and daydreams. The raw emotion in this book makes it impossible to put it down until the very last heart-wrench- ing page.”
—Vappu Tyyskä, Ryerson University

PART I: THE FOUR GENERATIONS
Chapter 1. An Uneventful Death
Chapter 2. The Dog who Soiled the Carpet
Chapter 3. My Name is Anna
Chapter 4. Four Generations of Women
PART II: GRANDMOTHERS
Chapter 5. Ta? Kale (The Stone Fortress)
Chapter 6. An Early Lesson in Gender Relations
Chapter 7. Beatrice
Chapter 8. Beatrice’s Stories
Chapter 9. Mavis
PART III: MOTHER as a DAUGHTER & WIFE
Chapter 10. Sophie
Chapter 11. New Year’s Celebrations
Chapter 12. Beatrice’s Death
Chapter 13. My Father
PART IV: SIBLINGS as DAUGHTERS
Chapter 14. Agnes
Chapter 15. Mavis’s House
Chapter 16. Mavis’s Kitchen
Chapter 17. The Cistern
Chapter 18. Mavis’s Fruit Trees
Chapter 19. May Father’s Chickens
Chapter 20. The Disease without a Name
Chapter 21. Randall
Chapter 22. An Uneventful Marriage
Chapter 23. In-Law Conflicts
PART V: THE FOURTH GENERATION
Chapter 24. Negrisse
Chapter 25. Delivery
Chapter 26. Parenthood as SUDOKU
PART VI: TANGLED RELATIONSHIPS
Chapter 27. UniversityYears&Gregory
Chapter 28. ‘Punk’Culture
Chapter 29. DungeonsandDragons
Chapter 30. MotherhoodHas9-Lives
PART VII: COMPLETED CYCLES, INCOMPLETE DREAMS
Chapter 31. Sophie’sDemise
Chapter 32. Anna’s LastYears
Acknowledgements

Aysan Sev’er is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the recipient of numerous national and international awards for her work on violence against women.

Demeter Press will be closed from June 28th to July 12th. All book orders placed during this time period will be shipped out the week of July 17th.

Mothers, Daughters & Untamed Dragons

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