All My Puny Sorrows
Mental health, Family
Fiction
Published by Faber
Shortlist
2015
A story of sisters, suicide and how to carry on with hope when grief loads the heart.
'All My Puny Sorrows', at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.
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Reviews
‘One of those rare novels destined to become a lifelong companion. This magnificently written story of two sisters, one of whom is determined to take her own life and asks the other for assistance, is shockingly funny, deeply wise and utterly heartbreaking.’
‘Toews' remarkable novel ... ironic for a book with self-annihilation as its subject, bursts with ramshackle, precious life. Full of eccentricities and casual, apposite quoting of literature, its tragicomedy and humaneness recall the best of John Irving.’
‘To write powerful fiction out of personal events of such magnitude is hard, surely almost unbearably so, but the result is a novel that reaches beyond the limits of itself.’
