Mother Superior

Mother Superior introduces Saleema Nawaz as a truly bold new voice in fiction. Gorgeous, sensuous prose and edgy, taboo-breaking subject matter combine to create a collection quite unlike anything else being published today.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.

Saleema Nawaz’s fiction has appeared in journals including Prairie Fire, Grain, The New Quarterly, and PRISM international and she is an alumnus of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. “The White Dress,” the final novella in this book, won the inaugural Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis at the University of Manitoba. She lives in Montreal, where she is at work on her first novel.