A Truce That Is Not Peace

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 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

A Truce That Is Not Peace was a #1 bestseller in Canada in w/c 06/09/2025