Overview

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'The best memoir you will read all year' NICK HORNBY 'A triumph – a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence' GUARDIAN 'A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights' NEW YORK TIMES 'This is memoir perfection … I adored it' CARIAD LLOYD 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. '[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 ‘There are few writers who so fully inhabit the vulnerable space between violence and grace, criticism and compassion, as Toews does' AnOther Magazine '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 '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

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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, author of Sandwich ‘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 … essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times’ Laura van den Berg, author of 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

‘This is memoir perfection. Toews manages to be funny about life’s hardest moments, whilst remaining as honest and vulnerable as only a truly great writer can be. I adored it’ Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone ‘Why does Miriam Toews write? A Truce That Is Not Peace answers the question in a hundred ways, all of them original, autobiographical, deeply painful, funny, oblique, confounding – just as those of us who believe her to be one of the greatest living North American writers have come to expect. A Truce That Is Not Peace is the best memoir you will read all year’ Nick Hornby, author of Just Like You ‘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 ‘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, author of Sandwich ‘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 … essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times’ Laura van den Berg, author of 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

Author Information

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

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