A Truce That Is Not Peace

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'Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable'ZADIE SMITH'A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion's Blue Nights'NEW YORK TIMES'Darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny'MARIE CLAIREA book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman and Irish Times.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'This is memoir perfection ... I adored it' Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone'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'Toews has done something very rare: shown us a true inner world' Samuel Graydon, author of Einstein in Time and Space'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 ManyA Truce That Is Not Peacewas a #1 bestseller in Canada in w/c 06/09/2025