A Truce That Is Not Peace
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2025
‘The best memoir you will read all year’ NICK HORNBY
‘A triumph – a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence’ GUARDIAN
‘Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable’ ZADIE SMITH
‘Darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny’ MARIE CLAIRE
A book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman and Irish Times.
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.
A Truce That Is Not Peace is the first time Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; wrenching and joyful – this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
‘A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights’ New York Times
‘[Toews] does not shy away from her own vulnerability, and writes with both candour and humour’ Observer
‘Toews knows exactly how to extract hilarity from horrifying events’ The Times
‘Nothing short of a masterpiece’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘This is memoir perfection … I adored it’ Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone
‘Brilliant … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
‘Tragi-comic, and incredibly moving … essential reading for turbulent times’ Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
‘Toews has done something very rare: shown us a true inner world’ Samuel Graydon, author of Einstein in Time and Space
‘An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety … remarkable’ Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait
‘I would have read another thousand chapters’ Catherine Newman, author of Sandwich
‘Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance’ Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many
A Truce That Is Not Peace was a #1 bestseller in Canada in w/c 06/09/2025
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Toews (Fight Night) delivers a haunting meditation on writing and death in her first work of nonfiction. When Toews was invited to a literary conference in Mexico City, organizers asked her to submit an answer to the question "Why do you write?" Personal anecdotes, literary quotes, and biographical snippets about authors who died by suicide tumbled onto the page in response. Expanding on those thoughts, Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor ("My four-year-old grandson calls his one-year-old brother a fucking noodle head, and now I'm the one in a trouble") and mundane memories of backpacking trips and encounters with wildlife near her Toronto home. Her father and sister both killed themselves, each enveloped by long bouts of silence before their deaths, and Toews struggled to hold on in the aftermath, dreaming of being shot in the face and envisioning her own drowning. While often conversational, Toews's prose has the power stop the reader in her tracks: "Silence and writing are, if not quite the same thing, then allies," Toews muses, "each a misdirection of the unspeakable, and each a way of holding on." At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed.
