A Truce That Is Not Peace

'The best memoir you will read all year' NICK HORNBY 'This is memoir perfection … I adored it' CARIAD LLOYD 'A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights' NEW YORK TIMES 'An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety … remarkable’ CELIA PAUL 'Brilliant … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ SHARLENE TEO The internationally bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews, returns with a singular memoir celebrating disobedient memory, wit, writing and life. ‘Why do you write?’ the organiser of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews – all of them unsatisfactory to the organiser – surfaces new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realises, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. A Truce That Is Not Peace is the first time Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; wrenching and joyful – this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it. '[Toews] does not shy away from her own vulnerability, and writes with both candour and humour’ OBSERVER 'Nothing short of a masterpiece’ SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE ‘Tragi-comic, and incredibly moving … essential reading for turbulent times’ LAURA VAN DEN BERG ‘A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner’ HANNAH PITTARD