A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

‘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 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

‘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 NEWMAN

About the Author:

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.

28 Aug 2025

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews ISBN 9780008803278