Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Miriam Toews is the author of seven previous bestselling novels, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is 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. It doesn't matter what words you use in life, it's not gonna prevent you from suffering.'' Come for Toews's unparalleled knack for writing sour grandmothers stay for Swiv, the precocious child narrator who says things like this: 'I don't know why saying bowel movement and stool is better than vag and piehole. 'Rivaling some of Toews's best novels, Fight Night is the most invigorating work of art in Toews's oeuvre thus far. Living in a time when Toews is writing is a reason to rejoice.” Her gigantic mind and heart are singular her sentence-making powers, extraordinary.

“In Fight Night as in her previous books, Miriam Toews is a genius. Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2021” While you will find Toews’ trademark themes of survival and community here, this novel is an absurdist comedy that will make you giggle into your soup.”

“A relentlessly entertaining novel about three generations of women living under one roof, most of it rambunctiously reported by Swiv. As Susan Cole, in Now magazine, says, ‘Few authors mix humor and deep emotion with Toews’s skill.’” “A novel as moving as it is full of humor. Externally.”įight Night is a love letter to the mothers and grandmothers who have raised us, and to all the women who know what it costs to live in this world, but who are still finding a way-painfully, ferociously-to live on their own terms. Swiv’s mother, too, is fighting “on every front,” as Grandma puts it, “Internally. “You are a small thing,” Grandma writes to Gord, “but you must learn to fight.” Grandma has been fighting all her life: from her upbringing in a strictly religious community, ruled over by the odious Will Braun, she has fought the people who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit she has fought to protect her family, and she has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her.

Swiv’s assignment to Grandma is to write a letter to Gord, her unborn grandchild and Swiv’s brother or sister. When Swiv is temporarily kicked out of school, her grandma gives her an assignment to write a letter to her absent father. From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply human new novel about three generations of women.

Novel by miriam toews