Frida, and her husband Blake have chosen not to have children. Concentrating on her artistic career instead, Frida has mostly managed to accept this difficult decision while putting her own traumatic childhood behind her. That is, until a stranger knocks on their door with a child she insists is Blake’s daughter. From that moment on their fragile marriage, their lives are devastatingly changed forever.

Deirdre Simon Dore is a Canadian writer. Her short fiction has won, among other awards, the Journey Prize and has been published in numerous journals and translated into Italian. Her plays have been produced in Vancouver and Calgary. Originally from New York and a graduate of Boston University, she has an MFA in creative writing from UBC. After homesteading on a remote island in B.C., she moved inland where she acquired a woodlot licence on which she planted trees and learned to use a chainsaw. She lives near a large lake in the interior of British Columbia with her husband, black lab and assorted livestock. She has two children.

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“A Reluctant Mother is mesmeric, wildly inventive, and hallucinatory. Sometimes hilarious. Frida, Dore's heroine, is fierce, hard core, full of fire, with a moral compass just steady enough to navigate nightmares and heartbreak. Here's what it's like to be a mother - for those who can't, those who won't, and those who are - whether they're reluctant or not — giving it everything they've got.” —Lisa Moore, author of This is How We Love and February

“Plot twists galore, along with symbols (deer, and oh yes, those ravens); and multiple perspectives abound. It takes nearly to the novel’s end to truly unravel the many up-and-down turns this story takes. This is a book that’s bound to keep you guessing. But while you’re guessing, I’m betting that you’ll keep turning pages, just as I did, and that, when you get there, you won’t be disappointed in the least.” —The British Columbia Review