Author guide

Miriam Toews Books in Order

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer born in Steinbach, Manitoba, and based in Toronto. Drawing on her Mennonite upbringing and experiences of family loss, her fiction combines humor with examinations of religious control, mental illness, suicide, trauma, and resilience. She is the author of eight novels, including A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, Women Talking, and Fight Night, as well as the memoirs Swing Low: A Life and A Truce That Is Not Peace. Her work has received major Canadian literary honors, including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award.

literary fictionmemoirnonfiction

Catalog record updated August 25, 2026.

Miriam Toews's Newest Book

A Truce That Is Not Peace

memoir · First published 2025

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, 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. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

Not sure where to begin?

Start with one of these

A Complicated Kindness

A landmark, award-winning novel that captures Toews's characteristic blend of dark humor, emotional depth, and Mennonite cultural critique.

All My Puny Sorrows

A powerful introduction to her intimate treatment of family, depression, suicide, and the tension between love and individual autonomy.

Outside the series

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Novels (8)

Summer of My Amazing Luck
novel · 1996

When young single mothers Lish and Lucy leave the Have-a-Life welfare housing project and head to Colorado to find the fire-eater who fathered Lish's twins, Lucy discovers this just may be the summer of her amazing luck.
A Boy of Good Breeding
novel · 1998

Knute is a twenty-four-year-old single mother who returns home to Algren with her daughter to look after her father Tom, who has suffered a heart attack. Meanwhile, Hosea Funk, a friend of Tom's and the mayor of Algren has a lot on his…
A Complicated Kindness
novel · 2004

In this stunning coming-of-age novel, award-winner Miriam Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the better-looking half,…
The Flying Troutmans
novel · 2008

Some families appear destined for catastrophe: meet the Troutmans. Hattie’s boyfriend has just dumped her, her sister Min is back in the psych ward, and Min’s kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively.…
Irma Voth
novel · 2011

The stifling, reclusive life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew moves in to make a movie about the strict religious community in which she and her family live.
All My Puny Sorrows
novel · 2014

The multi-award winning, #1 national bestselling novel about two unforgettable sisters and a love that illuminates life—from the author of Women Talking and A Complicated Kindness Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters leading very…
Women Talking
novel · 2018

The internationally bestselling novel based on real events. Now a major motion picture from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. “This amazing, sad,…
Fight Night
novel · 2021

"Move over, Scout Finch! There’s a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "A revelation."…

Nonfiction (2)

Swing Low: A Life
memoir · 2000

One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. A loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and an immensely popular schoolteacher, Mel was a pillar of his close-knit…
A Truce That Is Not Peace
memoir · 2025

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her…