Irma Voth
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
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 religous community in which she and her family live. She is drawn to the creative passion and warmth of their world but her domineering father is determined to keep her from it at all costs. The confrontation between them sets her on an irrevocable path towards something that feels like freedom as she and her young sister, Aggie, wise beyond her teenage years, flee to the city, upheld only by their love for each other and their smart wit, even as they begin to understand the tragedy that has their family in its grip.
Irma Voth delves into the complicated factors that set us on the road to self-discovery and how we can sometimes find the strength to endure the really hard things that happen. It also asks that most
difficult of questions: How do we forgive? And most importantly, how do we forgive ourselves?The new novel from Miriam Toews returns to the subject of a Mennonite community, so powerfully rendered in her award-winning, number-one bestseller A Complicated Kindness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Toews's (A Complicated Kindness) story unfolds in a remote Mennonite outpost in Mexico, where the strictly observant cross paths with the narcos, creating an uncomfortable cultural mix of Spanish, English, and Low German. Nineteen-year-old Irma tells of her own alienation from the Mennonites after marrying a young Mexican man. Though she still lives near her family, her patriarchal father has ordered her shunned (her spirited little sister, however, continues to visit, half-angry, half-longing for brief contact). After a quick wedding, Irma's husband is rarely home, and Irma is lonely until an eccentric crew of filmmakers arrives to make a movie set among the Mennonites. Irma works as a translator and finds much in common with these artists and lost souls. But her father holds an overblown hatred of the filmmakers, believing them evil. When his menacing opposition begins to threaten the film and her sister's safety Irma, ennobled by her experience on the production, makes a radical choice that will greatly affect her family. With her fifth novel, Toews, who was born into a Mennonite community in Canada, combines an intimate coming-of-age tale with picaresque and extremely effective prose.
