Author: Toews, Miriam
North America
Published on 28 August 2025 by HarperCollins Publishers (Fourth Estate Ltd) in the United Kingdom.
Hardback | 192 pages
224 x 145 x 21 | 308g
'The best memoir you will read all year' NICK HORNBY
'This is memoir perfection … I adored it' CARIAD LLOYD
'A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights'
NEW YORK TIMES
'An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety … remarkable’ CELIA PAUL
'Brilliant … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ SHARLENE TEO
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.
'[Toews] does not shy away from her own vulnerability, and writes with both candour and humour’
OBSERVER
'Nothing short of a masterpiece’ SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
‘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