Swing Low

'Witty and daring … with a hearse-black wit and a quiet wisdom' GUARDIAN

'A profoundly affecting book' TORONTO STAR

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews recounts her father's life as he might have told it, right up to his final day.

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression.

With razor-sharp precision, Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment.

Reverberating with emotional power, authenticity, and insight, Swing Low is a humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher.

Reviews

'The magic of Swing Low is that Toews makes a life that looked ordinary, even grindingly so, seem exalted' New York Times Book Review

'Witty and daring … with a hearse-black wit and quiet wisdom … The result is a portrait that lives beyond paper' Guardian

'Toews' novelistic skills are richly apparent in her evocative characterizations and in the deft drama of the narrative … A profoundly affecting book' Toronto Star

'Audacious, original and profoundly moving … Healing is a likely outcome of a book imbued with the righteous anger, compassion and humanity of Swing Low' Globe and Mail

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.