Miriam Toews's picture
50 followers
99 books added

Miriam Toews


Canada (b.1964)

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her non-fiction book "Swing Low: A Life" was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression. Her 2004 novel "A Complicated Kindness" was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Russian Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.
 


Genres: Literary Fiction
 
New and upcoming books
Novels
   Summer of My Amazing Luck (1996)
   A Boy of Good Breeding (1998)
   A Complicated Kindness (2004)
   The Flying Troutmans (2008)
   Irma Voth (2011)
   All My Puny Sorrows (2014)
   Women Talking (2018)
   Fight Night (2021)
   A Truce That is Not Peace (2025)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
no image available
 
Non fiction show
 
Books containing stories by Miriam Toews
thumb
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 (2017)
(Best American Nonrequired Reading)
edited by
Sarah Vowell

Award nominations
2015 The Writers' Prize for Fiction (nominee) : All My Puny Sorrows


Miriam Toews recommends
thumb
Daughter (2023)
Claudia Dey
"Daughter is a breathtaking and brilliant novel about the exquisite pain and agony that come from loving and needing certain people in our lives to love us back, to love us better. It is also about how we are relentless animals, wild and searching, trying to get our crushed, hungry bodies into our wolf packs. I was profoundly moved by it, so uncompromising and so true."
thumb
Black Dove (2022)
Colin McAdam
"Colin McAdam's voice is original and fiercely intelligent. It somehow possesses this combination of hard-won world weariness and exuberant, unshakeable faith in a better world. He exposes all of our treacherous and base instincts but with the unspoken caveat that, in spite of our horrible human ways, we must always, relentlessly, struggle to love each other. Aside from McAdam's great talents as a storyteller, it's this feeling I get from his work, profoundly moving, that I strive to duplicate in my own writing."
thumb
The Vanishing Sky (2020)
L Annette Binder
"In her intimate and epic debut novel, L Annette Binder lifts the lid on one family's darkest story to offer vital insight into daily life under the last days of the Third Reich. The Vanishing Sky is a heartrending and blazingly lucid depiction of Nazi Germany as not a simple monolith of evil but as an oppressive, fanatical political regime that was encountered, accommodated, rejected, and survived by ordinary people, people just like you and me."

More recommendations 


Visitors also looked at these authors


About Fantastic Fiction       Information for Authors