A Truce That Is Not Peace

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'The best memoir you will read all year' — Nick Hornby

'A triumph – a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence' — The Guardian

'A grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights' — New York Times

'This is memoir perfection … I adored it' — Cariad Lloyd

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 realises she has been maintaining 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

‘Toews knows exactly how to extract hilarity from horrifying events' — The Times

'Nothing short of a masterpiece' — San Francisco Chronicle

‘There are few writers who so fully inhabit the vulnerable space between violence and grace, criticism and compassion, as Toews does’ — AnOther Magazine

'Brilliant … it broke my heart in the best of ways’ — Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

‘Tragi-comic, and incredibly moving … essential reading for turbulent times’ — Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

'An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety … remarkable’ — Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait

'I would have read another thousand chapters’ — Catherine Newman, author of Sandwich

‘Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance’ — Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many

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