A Truce That Is Not Peace

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2025

‘The best memoir you will read all year’ NICK HORNBY

‘A triumphant meditation on loss, literature and the unspoken’ GUARDIAN

‘Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable’ ZADIE SMITH

‘Darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny’ MARIE CLAIRE

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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD

A book of the year in the Guardian, New Yorker, TIME, Washington Post, New Statesman, NPR, Irish Times and LitHub.

‘Toews knows exactly how to extract hilarity from horrifying events’ THE TIMES

‘Memoir perfection … I adored it’ CARIAD LLOYD, author of You Are Not Alone

‘I can’t get enough of Miriam’s Toews’ writing’ NINA STIBBE, author of Went to London, Took the Dog

‘Beautiful, hilarious, devastating’ PAULA HAWKINS, author of The Blue Hour

‘Brilliant … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ SHARLENE TEO, author of Ponti

‘A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights’ NEW YORK TIMES

A Truce That Is Not Peace was a #1 bestseller in Canada in w/c 06/09/2025

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.