Dagmar's Daughter follows three generations of passionate and powerful women.

Norea Nolan emerges from the destitute Irish village of her upbringing by stealing the boots from her mother's coffin, walking to Dublin, and stowing herself on a ship bound for a remote island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Norea's daughter, Dagmar, is born with an uncanny ability to control the weather and a remarkable gift for gardening. As she develops into a striking woman she is wooed and won by Colin Cane, a musician who loves her fiercely, but is unfaithful.

Dagmar's daughter Nyssa is as musically brilliant as her father and as struck with wanderlust. She runs off with one of her father's oldest friends, a musician who has returned to the island after a long self-imposed exile, and loses herself in his dark world. Dagmar is undone by her daughter's disappearance and her wrath invokes an icy rain, which envelops the landscape in a thick layer of ice.

Mystical, seductive, and brimming with music and magic, Dagmar's Daughter draws upon the ancient myths of Inanna, conqueror of the underworld, and Demeter's search for Persephone, her lost daughter.

A nationalist and lifelong journalist, Barbara Moon was the author of hundreds of major articles in magazines such as Maclean's and Saturday Night and features in newspapers such as the Globe and Mail. She wrote dozens of television documentaries, among them several segments of the experimental CBC-TV Images of Canada series, and books, including The Natural History of the Canadian Shield. From 1992 to 1998, she was a senior editor for the Creative Non-fiction and Cultural Journalism Program (now called the Literary Journalism Program) at The Banff Centre. Among relevant honours, Moon held a Maclean-Hunter first prize for Editorial Achievement, the University of Western Ontario's President's Medal, and the National Magazine Foundation's Award for Outstanding Achievement. Barbara Moon died in April 2009 near her home in Picton, Ontario, after a brief illness. Kim Echlin is the author of Elephant Winter, nominated for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and won the TORGI Talking Book of the Year Award. Her latest novel is The Disappeared. After completing a doctoral thesis on Ojibway story-telling, she travelled in search of stories through the Marshall Islands, China, France, and Zimbabwe. On her return to Canada she became an arts documentary producer with CBC's The Journal, and a writer for various publications. Don Obe is a professor emeritus of magazine journalism, a former chair of the school and founder of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. His professional experience includes editor-in-chief of The Canadian magazine and Toronto Life, and associate editor of Maclean's. From 1989 to 1999 he was senior resident editor in and, at times, the director of the Creative Nonfiction and Cultural Journalism Program (now called the Literary Journalism Program) at the Banff Centre. He won a gold medal in the National Magazine Awards for ethical writing and, in l993, his industry's highest honour, the National Magazine Award for Outstanding Achievement. He retired in 2001.

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