Reviews
""This small book is bursting with hilariousness and suffering and rage and also so much tenderness that the pages are practically flying off like paper-airplane love letters. I would have read another thousand chapters."" --Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of SANDWICH and WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS ""Why do I write? Miriam Toews's response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times."" --Laura van den Berg, author of STATE OF PARADISE and THE THIRD HOTEL ""Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner."" --Hannah Pittard, author of WE ARE TOO MANY ""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, Editor's Choice on international bestseller WOMEN TALKING ""Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest . . . She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves."" --The New Yorker on international bestseller WOMEN TALKING ""Ardent, hilarious, and moving."" --NPR.org on FIGHT NIGHT ""In the crucible of [Miriam Toews'] genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life."" --Ron Charles, The Washington Post on ALL MY PUNY SORROWS
""Toews' new genre-bending memoir-an astute reflection on both the significance and the inadequacy of language, a bittersweet and often wry retelling of impactful moments from her life, and a profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss-is nothing short of a masterpiece . . . Right from the start, A Truce That Is Not Peace reads like a whirling dervish of unbridled longing, bewilderment, sadness, anger, regret and joy that picks you up, swirls you around and doesn't let up until the dance, the storm-and, yes, the journey-is done."" --The San Francisco Chronicle ""Revelatory . . . Like much of Toews' fiction, it is as fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic . . . This is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, or Alexandra Fuller's Fi: written not from the trenches of fresh loss but from the steadier perch of a generation-long hindsight."" --New York Times Book Review ""In this lyrical memoir, Toews explores her writing career with storytelling that is at once propulsive and recursive, using her work as evidence of both her success and her inability to escape her past. It's bracing, candid reading."" --The Los Angeles Times, ""30 Must-Read Books for Summer"" ""A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated [Toews'] work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. . . The reader bobs along in the author's stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live."" --The Atlantic ""Unforgettable . . . Using a loose associative structure, Toews brings to light her subconscious, showing how grief tangles itself throughout one's mind, becoming part of its very wiring . . . Toews can't answer the question 'Why do I write?' satisfactorily to the literary event organizer. Instead, she delivers us something far more valuable. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a guttural exhumation of grief that ultimately weighs the joys of living against its sorrows, and tries to figure out why some of us can't endure the math. Formally inventive and exquisitely executed, Toews' memoir shows us that bearing witness to one's own grief-however disjointed, morbid or painful it is-can grant reprieve."" --Bookpage, starred review ""A haunting meditation on writing and death . . . Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor . . . At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Epistolary at turns, poetic at others, always keenly observant . . . A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller."" --Kirkus Reviews ""Trauma is not a hackneyed literary trope in the work of Miriam Toews. Her first memoir emerges from the extreme and mysterious grief she endured after the deaths of her sister and father . . . Readers will encounter once more [Toews'] resilient and furious comedy, rearranged, annotated, and enlarged . . . [A] circling structure is what Toews has designed for her memoir, wheeling through death, family, and weather in an investigative manner. It may appear a formless form, but it has both elasticity and intent. She will not avoid anything . . . A Truce That Is Not Peace is both an anguished commonplace book and an exhilarating brainstorm. Its winds whistle and wail."" --The New York Review of Books ""An incandescent read."" --People Magazine, ""Best Books of August"" ""A memoir in which [Toews] grapples with why she keeps returning to her sister's story, how reliable her memory is and whether she should be writing about this stuff in the first place. All of Toews' books are outstanding but if you have not read her, this could be a great place to start."" --Minnesota Star-Tribune ""Miriam Toews is already beloved for her bestselling novels. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, the Canadian author dips her toe (or pen) into nonfiction, attempting to answer a question she was posed at an event years ago: why do you write? Her response is this wise and inventive book, part memoir, part meditation on memory and life."" --Boston Globe ""A fast-paced, genre-bending examination not of [Toews'] reasons but rather her will to write. In short, sharp bursts of prose that are often both joyful and devastating on the same page, Toews excavates layer after layer of grief and guilt as she explores her uneasy pact with memory."" --Poets and Writers ""[Toews'] voice blends dry humor with profound insight. You will feel this wise woman in the room with you as you read."" --Center for Fiction ""The psychological acuity, imagination, vividness, and wise humor that shape her novels . . . energize Toews' creatively structured, gorgeously written, and flat-out astonishing memoir . . . the reader is whirlwinded by experiences bizarre, comedic, tragic, and wondrous."" --Booklist ""Miriam Toews writes hilariously about the saddest things . . . bringing her trademark wry humor to the page as she excavates her life as a writer, sister, daughter and friend."" --Bookpage ""Beguiling . . . There is intimacy in what Toews is willing to share and in the way she chooses to share it. Reading this memoir is like reading a journal: private, surprising, and vulnerable. 'Why do I write?' the imagined comité asks over and over again before rejecting Toews' answers and, ultimately, her participation at the conference. It's a shame, really. The answer to their question is here - sometimes whispered, sometimes howled. If only they would listen."" --Washington Independent Review of Books ""Toews' latest book pivots on a question: 'Why do you write?' The answer ought to be a layup for a writer on book tour, or at least rehearsed enough by now to sound like it. Of course, it's not that simple. The question and her digressive answers give this slim, eclectic memoir - Toews' first - its motor and shape, as she draws on episodes across her life."" --NPR ""The first time [Toews] has written about her life in nonfiction. The book began when a reader asked her, 'Why do you write?' Each answer felt unsatisfactory, which led her to explore what compels her to write-and what a moving, emotional result."" --Town & Country, ""Must-Read Books of Summer"" ""The Canadian novelist answers a complicated question - Why do you write? - with this memoir that meditates on memory, creation, and grief as she comes to terms with her sister's suicide. There's nothing simple about grief, or about Toews's writing."" --The Boston Globe, ""75 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List"" ""The Canadian writer Miriam Toews brings heart, bite and wit to all her work . . . Ms. Toews's big subjects are sisterhood, love, loss, mental illness and survival--heavy stuff, to be sure. But a well-developed sense of the absurd is her magic weight-lifter . . . Now, in her memoir A Truce That is Not Peace, she delivers both a tender tribute to [her sister] Marjorie and a thought-provoking meditation on three linked themes: writing, silence and suicide. Ms. Toews again grapples with the sufferings of her father and sister, whose debilitating depressions led to long periods of silence from each . . . Like her other books, Truce is both very serious and very funny. Her frankness and wit recall Anne Lamott, minus the sermonizing, while her short bursts of epiphanies recall Jenny Offill."" --The Wall Street Journal ""Toews is vulnerable with readers in a new way, unpacking her personal tragedies and piecing together the parts of them that led her to become an author. This memoir is an emotional rollercoaster that is certain to strike readers with its honesty."" --Bookstr ""A moving memoir."" --The New York Post ""This small book is bursting with hilariousness and suffering and rage and also so much tenderness that the pages are practically flying off like paper-airplane love letters. I would have read another thousand chapters."" --Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of SANDWICH and WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS ""Why do I write? Miriam Toews's response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times."" --Laura van den Berg, author of STATE OF PARADISE and THE THIRD HOTEL ""Sardonic and original . . . For her, writing is indeed a bulwark against despair. The result here is more incisive than sad--a heartening encouragement to persist."" --Shelf Awareness ""Everything written by Miriam Toews is giant-like, full of its own internal humor and strange weather, and A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE is no exception. In trying to begin to answer why she writes, Toews ends by answering why she lives. A beautiful, breathtaking memoir."" --Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS ""Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner."" --Hannah Pittard, author of WE ARE TOO MANY ""I loved A Truce That Is Not Peace. It is written with such fiery brilliance that the sadness it contains is transformed into an affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever."" --Celia Paul, painter and author of SELF-PORTRAIT ""Toews' prose is as unpredictable as the pictures she paints of her life . . . yet it all hangs together, sometimes with arresting strength, sometimes so precariously that you hold your breath . . . Those who open A Truce That Is Not Peace as their first encounter with Toews might be taken aback by its bold dissonance, but the best advice is to trust the process."" --Bookreporter ""Miriam Toews is one of my favorite writers . . . The topics in Miriam's very first memoir feel familiar, like meeting up with old friends and getting right back into the groove of how you used to relate to each other. I might not recognize all of the factual details she refers to, but I am very familiar with the feelings--both tender and bleak--that came flooding back . . . The book is not at all a craft guide, but it is a testament to how to process extraordinary grief and still find the will to live."" --Maris Kriezman, The Maris Review weekly ""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, Editor's Choice on international bestseller WOMEN TALKING ""Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest . . . She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves."" --The New Yorker on international bestseller WOMEN TALKING ""Ardent, hilarious, and moving."" --NPR.org on FIGHT NIGHT ""In the crucible of [Miriam Toews'] genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life."" --Ron Charles, The Washington Post on ALL MY PUNY SORROWS
""Revelatory . . . Like much of Toews' fiction, it is as fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic . . . This is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, or Alexandra Fuller's Fi: written not from the trenches of fresh loss but from the steadier perch of a generation-long hindsight."" --New York Times Book Review ""Playful, propulsive, and strange . . . A Truce That Is Not Peace reveals a masterful writer exploring the inner workings of her own inquisitive mind . . . [Toews] follows the orbit of her thoughts, tracing the circuitous paths they take, and pondering what makes a person press on in both life and art."" --Time Magazine, ""100 Must-Read Books of the Year"" ""A memoir, a coming to terms with her sister's suicide, an answer to the question of why she writes, and more, Toews's latest book bounces from dreams to letters to family memories and musings on such subjects as wind and silence. Toews circles the mysteries and the tragedies of her life, trying to piece moments together in a way that will lend meaning to the larger panorama of her past. At the same time, she infuses the grief with humor; loss is leavened by laughter."" --The New Yorker, ""Best Books of the Year So Far"" ""Right from the start, A Truce That Is Not Peace reads like a whirling dervish of unbridled longing, bewilderment, sadness, anger, regret and joy that picks you up, swirls you around and doesn't let up until the dance, the storm-and, yes, the journey-is done."" --The San Francisco Chronicle ""In this lyrical memoir, Toews explores her writing career with storytelling that is at once propulsive and recursive, using her work as evidence of both her success and her inability to escape her past. It's bracing, candid reading."" --The Los Angeles Times, ""30 Must-Read Books for Summer"" ""A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated [Toews'] work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. . . The reader bobs along in the author's stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live."" --The Atlantic ""Toews, the acclaimed Canadian author of Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows and other novels, here writes about tragedies and silences in her family. But even in writing directly about her own life, Toews can't help but skew the lines of genre."" --The Washington Post, ""50 Notable Works of Nonfiction for the Year"" ""Miriam Toews makes art on the line between writing and silence . . . This memoir's very existence fulfills the assignment of the question [''Why Do I Write?'], if sideways. In its final pages, Toews arrives at a sort of compromise between writing and silence, talking and not talking."" --The Washington Post ""Unforgettable . . . Using a loose associative structure, Toews brings to light her subconscious, showing how grief tangles itself throughout one's mind, becoming part of its very wiring . . . Toews can't answer the question 'Why do I write?' satisfactorily to the literary event organizer. Instead, she delivers us something far more valuable."" --Bookpage, starred review ""An incandescent read."" --People Magazine, ""Best Books of August"" ""[Toews] will not avoid anything . . . A Truce That Is Not Peace is both an anguished commonplace book and an exhilarating brainstorm. Its winds whistle and wail."" --The New York Review of Books ""Beguiling . . . There is intimacy in what Toews is willing to share and in the way she chooses to share it. Reading this memoir is like reading a journal: private, surprising, and vulnerable. 'Why do I write?' the imagined comité asks over and over again before rejecting Toews' answers and, ultimately, her participation at the conference. It's a shame, really. The answer to their question is here - sometimes whispered, sometimes howled. If only they would listen."" --Washington Independent Review of Books ""A haunting meditation on writing and death . . . Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor . . . At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Epistolary at turns, poetic at others, always keenly observant . . . A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller."" --Kirkus Reviews ""A memoir in which [Toews] grapples with why she keeps returning to her sister's story, how reliable her memory is and whether she should be writing about this stuff in the first place. All of Toews' books are outstanding but if you have not read her, this could be a great place to start."" --Minnesota Star-Tribune ""Miriam Toews is already beloved for her bestselling novels. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, the Canadian author dips her toe (or pen) into nonfiction, attempting to answer a question she was posed at an event years ago: why do you write? Her response is this wise and inventive book, part memoir, part meditation on memory and life."" --Boston Globe ""A fast-paced, genre-bending examination not of [Toews'] reasons but rather her will to write. In short, sharp bursts of prose that are often both joyful and devastating on the same page, Toews excavates layer after layer of grief and guilt as she explores her uneasy pact with memory."" --Poets and Writers ""[Toews'] voice blends dry humor with profound insight. You will feel this wise woman in the room with you as you read."" --Center for Fiction ""The psychological acuity, imagination, vividness, and wise humor that shape her novels . . . energize Toews' creatively structured, gorgeously written, and flat-out astonishing memoir . . . the reader is whirlwinded by experiences bizarre, comedic, tragic, and wondrous."" --Booklist ""Toews' latest book pivots on a question: 'Why do you write?' The answer ought to be a layup for a writer on book tour, or at least rehearsed enough by now to sound like it. Of course, it's not that simple. The question and her digressive answers give this slim, eclectic memoir - Toews' first - its motor and shape, as she draws on episodes across her life."" --NPR ""The first time [Toews] has written about her life in nonfiction. The book began when a reader asked her, 'Why do you write?' Each answer felt unsatisfactory, which led her to explore what compels her to write-and what a moving, emotional result."" --Town & Country, ""Must-Read Books of Summer"" ""The Canadian novelist answers a complicated question - Why do you write? - with this memoir that meditates on memory, creation, and grief as she comes to terms with her sister's suicide. There's nothing simple about grief, or about Toews's writing."" --The Boston Globe, ""75 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List"" ""[Toews] delivers both a tender tribute to [her sister] Marjorie and a thought-provoking meditation on three linked themes: writing, silence and suicide. . . . Like her other books, Truce is both very serious and very funny. Her frankness and wit recall Anne Lamott, minus the sermonizing, while her short bursts of epiphanies recall Jenny Offill."" --The Wall Street Journal ""Toews is vulnerable with readers in a new way, unpacking her personal tragedies and piecing together the parts of them that led her to become an author. This memoir is an emotional rollercoaster that is certain to strike readers with its honesty."" --Bookstr ""A moving memoir."" --The New York Post ""A Truce That Is Not Peace is a tragic, darkly humorous, and contemplative exploration of grief, artistic ambition, what silence conveys, and how writing sustains life . . . [It] aims to answer unanswerable questions about grief, silence, and writing as a form of survival."" --Bookbrowse ""Sardonic and original . . . For her, writing is indeed a bulwark against despair. The result here is more incisive than sad--a heartening encouragement to persist."" --Shelf Awareness ""Formally inventive and exquisitely executed, A Truce That Is Not Peace sees Canadian novelist Miriam Toews perform an unforgettable exhumation of grief."" --BookPage, ""Best Books of 2025"" ""Toews' prose is as unpredictable as the pictures she paints of her life . . . yet it all hangs together, sometimes with arresting strength, sometimes so precariously that you hold your breath . . . Those who open A Truce That Is Not Peace as their first encounter with Toews might be taken aback by its bold dissonance, but the best advice is to trust the process."" --Bookreporter ""Engrossing . . . As in her novels Women Talking and Fight Night, the Toews we meet here doesn't just toe the line between the two extremes of [comedy and tragedy]; she proves there isn't one . . . the humor so prevalent here is a coping mechanism."" --The Week ""Miriam Toews is one of my favorite writers . . . The book is not at all a craft guide, but it is a testament to how to process extraordinary grief and still find the will to live."" --Maris Kriezman, The Maris Review weekly ""[Toews] chronicles her family's complicated history in imaginative prose that eschews chronological order and logical explanations, narrating a cohesive story through captivating motifs, trenchant humor, and heartrending details . . . A Truce That Is Not Peace is an extraordinary memoir, impressive for its innovative style and tight structure. It is deeply moving, thanks to Toews's original voice - attentive and attuned to the natural world, darkly humorous yet empathetic, unsparing as she remembers, with deep love, the dead."" --The Christian Century ""This small book is bursting with hilariousness and suffering and rage and also so much tenderness that the pages are practically flying off like paper-airplane love letters. I would have read another thousand chapters."" --Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of SANDWICH and WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS ""Why do I write? Miriam Toews's response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times."" --Laura van den Berg, author of STATE OF PARADISE and THE THIRD HOTEL ""Everything written by Miriam Toews is giant-like, full of its own internal humor and strange weather, and A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE is no exception. In trying to begin to answer why she writes, Toews ends by answering why she lives. A beautiful, breathtaking memoir."" --Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS ""Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner."" --Hannah Pittard, author of WE ARE TOO MANY ""I loved A Truce That Is Not Peace. It is written with such fiery brilliance that the sadness it contains is transformed into an affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever."" --Celia Paul, painter and author of SELF-PORTRAIT
""Right from the start, A Truce That Is Not Peace reads like a whirling dervish of unbridled longing, bewilderment, sadness, anger, regret and joy that picks you up, swirls you around and doesn't let up until the dance, the storm-and, yes, the journey-is done."" --The San Francisco Chronicle ""Revelatory . . . Like much of Toews' fiction, it is as fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic . . . This is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, or Alexandra Fuller's Fi: written not from the trenches of fresh loss but from the steadier perch of a generation-long hindsight."" --New York Times Book Review ""In this lyrical memoir, Toews explores her writing career with storytelling that is at once propulsive and recursive, using her work as evidence of both her success and her inability to escape her past. It's bracing, candid reading."" --The Los Angeles Times, ""30 Must-Read Books for Summer"" ""A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated [Toews'] work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. . . The reader bobs along in the author's stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live."" --The Atlantic ""Miriam Toews makes art on the line between writing and silence . . . This memoir's very existence fulfills the assignment of the question [''Why Do I Write?'], if sideways. In its final pages, Toews arrives at a sort of compromise between writing and silence, talking and not talking."" --The Washington Post ""Unforgettable . . . Using a loose associative structure, Toews brings to light her subconscious, showing how grief tangles itself throughout one's mind, becoming part of its very wiring . . . Toews can't answer the question 'Why do I write?' satisfactorily to the literary event organizer. Instead, she delivers us something far more valuable."" --Bookpage, starred review ""An incandescent read."" --People Magazine, ""Best Books of August"" ""[Toews] will not avoid anything . . . A Truce That Is Not Peace is both an anguished commonplace book and an exhilarating brainstorm. Its winds whistle and wail."" --The New York Review of Books ""Beguiling . . . There is intimacy in what Toews is willing to share and in the way she chooses to share it. Reading this memoir is like reading a journal: private, surprising, and vulnerable. 'Why do I write?' the imagined comité asks over and over again before rejecting Toews' answers and, ultimately, her participation at the conference. It's a shame, really. The answer to their question is here - sometimes whispered, sometimes howled. If only they would listen."" --Washington Independent Review of Books ""A haunting meditation on writing and death . . . Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor . . . At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Epistolary at turns, poetic at others, always keenly observant . . . A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller."" --Kirkus Reviews ""A memoir in which [Toews] grapples with why she keeps returning to her sister's story, how reliable her memory is and whether she should be writing about this stuff in the first place. All of Toews' books are outstanding but if you have not read her, this could be a great place to start."" --Minnesota Star-Tribune ""Miriam Toews is already beloved for her bestselling novels. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, the Canadian author dips her toe (or pen) into nonfiction, attempting to answer a question she was posed at an event years ago: why do you write? Her response is this wise and inventive book, part memoir, part meditation on memory and life."" --Boston Globe ""A fast-paced, genre-bending examination not of [Toews'] reasons but rather her will to write. In short, sharp bursts of prose that are often both joyful and devastating on the same page, Toews excavates layer after layer of grief and guilt as she explores her uneasy pact with memory."" --Poets and Writers ""[Toews'] voice blends dry humor with profound insight. You will feel this wise woman in the room with you as you read."" --Center for Fiction ""The psychological acuity, imagination, vividness, and wise humor that shape her novels . . . energize Toews' creatively structured, gorgeously written, and flat-out astonishing memoir . . . the reader is whirlwinded by experiences bizarre, comedic, tragic, and wondrous."" --Booklist ""Toews' latest book pivots on a question: 'Why do you write?' The answer ought to be a layup for a writer on book tour, or at least rehearsed enough by now to sound like it. Of course, it's not that simple. The question and her digressive answers give this slim, eclectic memoir - Toews' first - its motor and shape, as she draws on episodes across her life."" --NPR ""The first time [Toews] has written about her life in nonfiction. The book began when a reader asked her, 'Why do you write?' Each answer felt unsatisfactory, which led her to explore what compels her to write-and what a moving, emotional result."" --Town & Country, ""Must-Read Books of Summer"" ""The Canadian novelist answers a complicated question - Why do you write? - with this memoir that meditates on memory, creation, and grief as she comes to terms with her sister's suicide. There's nothing simple about grief, or about Toews's writing."" --The Boston Globe, ""75 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List"" ""[Toews] delivers both a tender tribute to [her sister] Marjorie and a thought-provoking meditation on three linked themes: writing, silence and suicide. . . . Like her other books, Truce is both very serious and very funny. Her frankness and wit recall Anne Lamott, minus the sermonizing, while her short bursts of epiphanies recall Jenny Offill."" --The Wall Street Journal ""Toews is vulnerable with readers in a new way, unpacking her personal tragedies and piecing together the parts of them that led her to become an author. This memoir is an emotional rollercoaster that is certain to strike readers with its honesty."" --Bookstr ""A moving memoir."" --The New York Post ""Sardonic and original . . . For her, writing is indeed a bulwark against despair. The result here is more incisive than sad--a heartening encouragement to persist."" --Shelf Awareness ""Toews' prose is as unpredictable as the pictures she paints of her life . . . yet it all hangs together, sometimes with arresting strength, sometimes so precariously that you hold your breath . . . Those who open A Truce That Is Not Peace as their first encounter with Toews might be taken aback by its bold dissonance, but the best advice is to trust the process."" --Bookreporter ""Engrossing . . . As in her novels Women Talking and Fight Night, the Toews we meet here doesn't just toe the line between the two extremes of [comedy and tragedy]; she proves there isn't one . . . the humor so prevalent here is a coping mechanism."" --The Week ""Miriam Toews is one of my favorite writers . . . The book is not at all a craft guide, but it is a testament to how to process extraordinary grief and still find the will to live."" --Maris Kriezman, The Maris Review weekly ""This small book is bursting with hilariousness and suffering and rage and also so much tenderness that the pages are practically flying off like paper-airplane love letters. I would have read another thousand chapters."" --Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of SANDWICH and WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS ""Why do I write? Miriam Toews's response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times."" --Laura van den Berg, author of STATE OF PARADISE and THE THIRD HOTEL ""Everything written by Miriam Toews is giant-like, full of its own internal humor and strange weather, and A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE is no exception. In trying to begin to answer why she writes, Toews ends by answering why she lives. A beautiful, breathtaking memoir."" --Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS ""Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner."" --Hannah Pittard, author of WE ARE TOO MANY ""I loved A Truce That Is Not Peace. It is written with such fiery brilliance that the sadness it contains is transformed into an affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever."" --Celia Paul, painter and author of SELF-PORTRAIT ""A Truce That Is Not Peace is a tragic, darkly humorous, and contemplative exploration of grief, artistic ambition, what silence conveys, and how writing sustains life . . . [It] aims to answer unanswerable questions about grief, silence, and writing as a form of survival."" --Bookbrowse
