A Truce That Is Not Peace

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.