Out of Bounds features Montreal women of different ages and cultural backgrounds facing a range of contemporary challenges and adventures at home and in other countries. Indigenous individuals, immigrant women, aging women, victims of domestic violence, addicts, and Holocaust survivors face making difficult choices at dramatic turning points in their lives. The stories are linked partly through one character who appears at key stages of her life, starting when she is sixteen and finishing when she is a retired anthropology professor and meets a fascinating but mysterious man she knew when she was a young reporter. She plays a role in the lives of several women featured in the book.
One of the women, who starts as an accountant and ends up helping poor women in Mexico start small businesses, has a rambling Montreal house where she welcomes women needing a safe place to escape to while making life-changing decisions. Settings include Montreal, Vancouver, and New York, as well as Portugal, Mexico, Antigua, Tunisia, Morocco, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and rural India.
Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos is the author of a novel and three non-fiction books. Her latest book, Saris on Scooters: How Microcredit Is Changing Village India, was a finalist for the Canadian National Business Book Award. She has won a Governor-General's Literary Award and earned several journalism prizes for exposés about marginalized women and minorities. While an investigative journalist for the Montreal Star, she worked underground in several Montreal sweatshops and wrote about the exploitation of immigrant women. She has also reported from Tunisia, India, and China. For many years, she taught journalism at Montreal's Concordia University.
Read this book! The women described within these pages demonstrate an extraordinary courage and determination to not only survive, but to thrive. Kismet Dyment , Environmental Book Review
Well-documented, eminently readable and uplifting. Maya Khankhoje , Herizons Magazine
Sleeping on hut floors and traveling on rickety buses and dusty rickshaws, she writes of her intimate interactions with the women of India with warmth and optimism… Sarah Fletcher , Montreal Review of Books
In 1974 as a very junior reporter at The Montreal Star, some senior reporters alerted me to a two-part major piece of reporting by Noel Mostert in the New Yorker magazine. The article was about oil supertankers, the skill required to navigate and operate them and their widespread pollution of the sea.
Microcredit consists of small loans offered in developing countries mostly to impoverished women, with no requirement for collateral, so that they can start small businesses.
Author of a novel about Montreal street children, and two books about English/French relations in Canada, Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos shared a Governor-General's Literary Award and has earned several journalism prizes for exposes about marginalized women and minorities.
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