Summer of My Amazing Luck

The debut novel from the bestselling author of Women Talking, written with her signature wit and compassion.

Lucy and her eight-month-old son live in a Winnipeg housing project filled with single mothers on the dole. Still dealing with her own mother’s sudden death, and new to the ever-multiplying complications of life on welfare, Lucy strikes up a friendship with her neighbour, Lish. On the whole, they’re pretty happy… But Lucy wants to make sure they stay happy. And she has a plan.

Told with Toews’s signature scalding wit and deep compassion, Summer Of My Amazing Luck is a brilliantly funny book about the intricacies of friendship, grief, and poverty.

Reviews

'Warm, curious, alive on the page' The New Yorker

‘Toews’ debut is a tart, affectionate look at welfare mothers …Toews is especially good on the “rollicking, happy, impoverished family” of the projects [and] scathing about the humiliations of poverty’ New York Times

'In the crucible of [Miriam Toews'] genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life' Washington Post

A comic take on what initially appears a most improbable topic for humour' The Globe and Mail

'Offers a humorous look at the absurdities of the Canadian welfare system while unwinding the intricacies of a sticky-sweet friendship' Publishers Weekly

About the author

Miriam Toews is the author of eight bestselling novels: Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a 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 Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.