‘This is memoir perfection ? I adored it’ CARIAD LLOYD

‘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

‘I would have read another thousand chapters’ CATHERINE NEWMAN

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.

‘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

‘A brilliant, absorbing, bittersweet memoir – I devoured it in one sitting’ SHARLENE TEO

‘Go Grandma Elvira!’ Margaret Atwood
‘Wickedly funny and fearlessly honest.’ The New Yorker
‘Glorious.’ Sarah Moss
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You are a small thing, and you must learn to fight.

Swiv has taken this advice too literally. Now she’s suspended from school, in the care of her foul-mouthed, hilarious grandmother.

Mom is busy being pregnant, so Grandma gives Swiv a very different education. Swiv learns maths with Amish jigsaws and How to Dig a Winter Grave. Grandma’s methods may be unorthodox, but she has faced the worst of life with a wild, independent spirit and this is what she hopes to pass on.

Time is running short. Grandma’s health is failing and the baby is on the way – can Grandma inspire this fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?

Poignant, hilarious and deeply moving, Fight Night is a girl’s love letter to the women raising her and a tribute to one family’s fighting spirit.

‘A love letter to our brave and brilliant matriarchs.’ Glamour
‘Miriam Toews is a genius.’ R. O. Kwon
‘As compelling and hilarious and indecently sad as life can be.’ Financial Times

‘Don’t miss this.’ MARGARET ATWOOD
‘Beautiful. . . a novel for the times.’ LISA McINERNEY
‘Tender, enraging and brimming with a bitter wit.’ The Times
‘An astonishment, a volcano of a novel.’ LAUREN GROFF

In a remote Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and violated-by what many thought were ghosts or demons-as punishment for their sins. Their accounts were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination.’

Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. When the women learn that they were in fact drugged and attacked by men in their community, they hold a secret meeting in a hayloft. They have two days to make a plan before the rapists are bailed out and brought home: will they dare to escape?

‘Profound, affecting stuff.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Brave and thoughtful.’ Observer

Swiv has taken her grandmother’s advice too literally. Now she’s at home, suspended from school. Mom is pregnant and preoccupied – and so Swiv is in the older woman’s charge, receiving a very different form of education from a teacher with a style all her own.

Grandma likes her stories fast, troublesome and funny. She’s known the very worst that life can throw at you – and has met it every time with a wild, unnamable spirit, fighting for joy and independence every step of the way. But will maths lessons based on Amish jigsaws and classes on How to Dig a Winter Grave inspire the same fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?

Time is running short. Grandma’s health is failing, the baby is on the way, as a family of three extraordinary women prepare to face life’s great changes together.

Poignant, hilarious and deeply moving, Fight Night is a girl’s love letter to the women raising her and a tribute to one family’s fighting spirit.