A Truce That Is Not Peace

‘I would have read another thousand chapters’ CATHERINE NEWMAN

‘Tragi-comic, and incredibly moving … essential reading for turbulent times’ LAURA VAN DEN BERG

‘A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner’ HANNAH PITTARD

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.

© 2025 Fourth Estate (Audiobook): 9780008722876

Release date

Audiobook: 28 August 2025