THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2025

‘The best memoir you will read all year’ NICK HORNBY

‘A triumphant meditation on loss, literature and the unspoken’ GUARDIAN

‘Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable’ ZADIE SMITH

‘Darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny’ MARIE CLAIRE

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 book of the year in the Guardian, New Yorker, TIME, Washington Post, New Statesman, NPR, Irish Times and LitHub.

‘Toews knows exactly how to extract hilarity from horrifying events’ THE TIMES

‘Memoir perfection … I adored it’ CARIAD LLOYD, author of You Are Not Alone

‘I can’t get enough of Miriam’s Toews’ writing’ NINA STIBBE, author of Went to London, Took the Dog

‘Beautiful, hilarious, devastating’ PAULA HAWKINS, author of The Blue Hour

‘Brilliant … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ SHARLENE TEO, author of Ponti

‘A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights’ NEW YORK TIMES