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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

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

Publisher Review

Praise for A Truce That Is Not Peace: 'This book is a triumph - a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence' Guardian 'Toews knows exactly how to extract hilarity from horrifying events ... a short, at times very funny account of some of the darkest moments in her life' The Times 'Discursive, revelatory ... As fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic ... this is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion's Blue Nights' New York Times Book Review 'Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable' Zadie Smith, author of Dead and Alive '[Toews] does not shy away from her own vulnerability, and writes with both candour and humour' Observer 'Wisecracks punctuate the meditative memoir ... It's in the elliptical details, often of domestic life, that Toews communicates the messiness of survival' Spectator 'Erudite, deeply, darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny' Marie Claire 'A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss' The Atlantic 'A profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss ... nothing short of a masterpiece' San Francisco Chronicle 'This is memoir perfection. Toews manages to be funny about life's hardest moments ... I adored it' Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone 'Original, autobiographical, deeply painful, funny ... A Truce That Is Not Peace is the best memoir you will read all year' Nick Hornby, author of Just Like You 'Beautiful, hilarious, devastating' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl On The Train 'A brilliant, absorbing, bittersweet memoir ... it broke my heart in the best of ways' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti 'An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever' Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait 'Toews has done something very rare: shown us a true inner world' Samuel Graydon, author of Einstein in Time and Space