All My Puny Sorrows
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
The multi-award winning, #1 national bestselling novel about two unforgettable sisters and a love that illuminates life—from the author of Women Talking and A Complicated Kindness
Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters leading very different lives. Elfreida is a renowned pianist, wealthy, and happily married. Her younger sister Yolandi is a writer, divorced, broke, and forever chasing after the wrong men in her search for true love. But Elf is struggling with her demons, and Yoli doesn't know what to do. Elf wants to die and wants Yoli to help her. Yoli desperately wants her sister to live. Three weeks before her highly-anticipated international tour, Elf lands in the hospital after her latest suicide attempt. There's doubt that she will be well in time, but Elf doesn't seem to care. As the bounds of the sisters' love for each other are tested, Yoli faces a decision that will forever change her life—and Elf's.
A critically acclaimed masterpiece, All My Puny Sorrows shows Toews at the height of her craft, making you smile while she breaks your heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elfrieda's a concert pianist. When we were kids she would occasionally let me be her page-tuner for the fast pieces that she hadn't memorized." This sentence, in the voice of the younger Yolandi, crystallizes the dynamic of the two sisters in Toews's (Summer of My Amazing Luck) latest novel. While Elfrieda is the genius and the perfectionist, it is the practical, capable Yolandi on whom she depends. Over the course of this tender and bittersweet novel, Elf tours the world while Yoli stays put, has two kids with two different men but stays with neither of the fathers. It is Elf's debilitating depression and suicidal tendencies that keep the two urgently close as Yoli, for decades, does everything she can to help Elf ward off her psychological problems. The prose throughout the book is lively and original and moves along at a steady clip. Though there are some underdeveloped aspects (their upbringing in a Mennonite household, Yoli's experience of motherhood), the novel is a triumph in its depiction of the love the sisters share, as Yoli tries, just as when she was a page turner, to stay a few beats ahead.
