A Truce That Is Not Peace: Unabridged edition
‘I would have read another thousand chapters’ CATHERINE NEWMAN
‘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
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.
”'This small book is bursting with hilariousness and suffering and rage and also so much tenderness that the pages are practically flying off like paper-airplane love letters. I would have read another thousand chapters” - Catherine Newman, author of Sandwich
”'A haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive … essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times” - Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
”'Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner” - Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many