A Truce That Is Not Peace

‘This book is a triumph – a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence … an illustration of why she’s one of Canada’s most admired writers’ Guardian, ‘Book of the Day’

‘Toews knows exactly how to extract hilarity from horrifying events … a short, at times very funny account of some of the darkest moments in her life’ The Times

‘Discursive, revelatory … As fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic … this is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights’ New York Times Book Review

‘[Toews] does not shy away from her own vulnerability, and writes with both candour and humour’ Observer

‘Wisecracks punctuate the meditative memoir … It’s in the elliptical details, often of domestic life, that Toews communicates the messiness of survival’ Spectator

‘Erudite, deeply, darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny’ Marie Claire

‘A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss’ The Atlantic

‘A profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss … nothing short of a masterpiece’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable’ Zadie Smith, author of Dead and Alive

‘This is memoir perfection. Toews manages to be funny about life’s hardest moments … I adored it’ Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone

‘Original, autobiographical, deeply painful, funny … A Truce That Is Not Peace is the best memoir you will read all year’ Nick Hornby, author of Just Like You

‘Beautiful, hilarious, devastating’ Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl On The Train

‘A brilliant, absorbing, bittersweet memoir … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

‘An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever’ Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait

‘Toews has done something very rare: shown us a true inner world’ Samuel Graydon, author of Einstein in Time and Space

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.