Kirjahaku

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.

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. With razor-sharp precision,Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment. A humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher.

**READ THE BOOK BEFORE YOU WATCH THE MAJOR FILM STARRING CLAIRE FOY, JESSIE BUCKLEY, ROONEY MARA AND BEN WHISHAW**'Don't miss this.' MARGARET ATWOOD'Beautiful. . . a novel for the times.' LISA McINERNEY'Tender, enraging and brimming with a bitter wit.' The Times'An astonishment, a volcano of a novel.' LAUREN GROFFIn a remote Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and violated-by what many thought were ghosts or demons-as punishment for their sins. Their accounts were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.' Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. When the women learn that they were in fact drugged and attacked by men in their community, they hold a secret meeting in a hayloft. They have two days to make a plan before the rapists are bailed out and brought home: will they dare to escape?'Profound, affecting stuff.' Sunday Telegraph'Brave and thoughtful.' Observer

Shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2015Sunday Times Top Choice Summer ReadA SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYElf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.'The novel she has written - so exquisitely that you'll want to savour every word - reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times'[Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.' Daily Mail

We're Mennonites. As far as I know, we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager.Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City's East Village. Instead she's trapped in East Village, Manitoba: a town with no train station, no bar, and where job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir.Since her mother and sister have left home, Nomi lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher. Fighting against the restraints of the town, Nomi's longing for a future of opportunity and hope sets her on course towards a climax at once startling and inevitable.

Knute is a twenty-four-year-old single mother who returns home to Algren with her daughter to look after her father Tom, who has suffered a heart attack. Meanwhile, Hosea Funk, a friend of Tom's and the mayor of Algren has a lot on his mind. The prime minister has promised to pay a visit to whichever town in Canada has the smallest population. Algren has held this position for some time but recent baby booms and returning families, like Knute, threaten to tip Algren over the magic 1500 . . .

'In this chaotic world the only stability comes from our love for one another, quirks and all. In Toews's hands, that can be funny or heartbreaking, usually at the same time.' Washington PostMeet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, city of romance, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a particularly dark period. And Min's two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. When Hattie receives a phone call from eleven-year-old Thebes, begging her to return to Canada, she arrives home to find Min on her way to a psychiatric ward, and becomes responsible for her niece and nephew. Realising that she is way out of her league, Hattie hatches a plan to find the kids' long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead to go on, she piles Logan and Thebes into the family van, and they head south . . .

Jorge said he wasn't coming back until I learned how to be a better wife . . . But before he drove off he gave me a new flashlight with triple C batteries and I'm grateful for it because this is a very dark, pitch-black part of the world . . . The closeted life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew arrives. They have come to make a movie about the strict Mennonite community in which she and her family live. Against her family's wishes, Irma takes a job on set and glimpses the wider world and a path towards something that feels like freedom.

'Toews's debut is a tart, affectionate look at welfare mothers...Toews is especially good on the "rollicking, happy, impoverished family" of the projects [and] scathing about the humiliations of poverty.' New York TimesLucy and her eight-month-old son live in a Winnipeg housing project filled with single mothers on the dole. Still dealing with her own mother's sudden death, and new to the ever-multiplying complications of life on welfare, Lucy strikes up a friendship with her neighbour, Lish. On the whole, they're pretty happy . . . But Lucy wants to make sure they stay happy. And she has a plan.Told with Toews's signature scalding wit and deep compassion, Summer of my Amazing Luck is a brilliantly funny book about the intricacies of friendship, grief, and poverty.'[A] picaresque account of two welfare moms having loopy adventures and getting by in the city... The novel's voice [is] amused, warm, curious, alive on the page.' The New Yorker

FROM THE WRITER OF THE OSCAR-WININNG WOMEN TALKINGINTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHORLONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD'Go Grandma Elvira!' Margaret Atwood'Wickedly funny and fearlessly honest.' The New Yorker'Glorious.' Sarah Moss____________You are a small thing, and you must learn to fight.Swiv has taken this advice too literally. Now she's suspended from school, in the care of her foul-mouthed, hilarious grandmother. Mom is busy being pregnant, so Grandma gives Swiv a very different education. Swiv learns maths with Amish jigsaws and How to Dig a Winter Grave. Grandma's methods may be unorthodox, but she has faced the worst of life with a wild, independent spirit and this is what she hopes to pass on. Time is running short. Grandma's health is failing and the baby is on the way - can Grandma inspire this fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?Poignant, hilarious and deeply moving, Fight Night is a girl's love letter to the women raising her and a tribute to one family's fighting spirit.'A love letter to our brave and brilliant matriarchs.' Glamour'Miriam Toews is a genius.' R. O. Kwon'As compelling and hilarious and indecently sad as life can be.' Financial Times

'Sets standards for grandmotherly swearing and outspokenness I can never hope to match. Go Grandma Elvira!' Margaret Atwood

The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand.INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER "This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale." -Margaret Atwood, on Twitter "Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the "minutes" of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly). Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one who truly wants to die? All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply personal story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.

"Move over, Scout Finch There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "A revelation." -Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. "You're a small thing," Grandma writes, "and you must learn to fight." Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting--painfully, ferociously-- for a way to live on their own terms.

"Move over, Scout Finch There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "A revelation." -Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. "You're a small thing," Grandma writes, "and you must learn to fight." Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting-painfully, ferociously- for a way to live on their own terms.

"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." -Laura van den Berg Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society. "Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, 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. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews recounts her father's life as he might have told it, right up to his final day. One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. A loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and an immensely popular school teacher, Mel was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggling with bipolar disorder, he could no longer face the ruptures in his world. Swing Low is an elegiac ode to a life by an author drawing from the deepest wells of insight and emotion.

"Toews is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves." -Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker Jorge said he wasn't coming back until I learned how to be a better wife . . . The life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew arrives to make a movie about the strict Mennonite community in which she and her family live. Against her family's wishes, Irma takes a job on set and glimpses the wider world and a path towards something that feels like freedom.