Mothers, Daughters & Untamed Dragons

Aysan Sev’er

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 other women, and some incidental men, spanning generations and continents, and weaving together national and personal histories. It is the central fractured relationship between mother and daughter in which the dragons in women are realized, expressed in maternal memories, regrets, recriminations, and daydreams. The raw emotion in this book makes it impossible to put it down until the very last heart-wrenching page.”

—Vappu Tyyskä, Ryerson University

About the Author

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.