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 An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety remarkable CELIA PAUL I would have read another thousand chapters CATHERINE NEWMANThe 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 Tragi comic and incredibly moving essential reading for t