A Truce That Is Not Peace

Miriam Toews

£16.99

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HarperCollins Publishers
28 August 2025
ISBN: 9780008722845
Hardback
192 pages

From the publisher

The new memoir from the internationally bestselling author of Women Talking

‘I would have read another thousand chapters’ CATHERINE NEWMAN

'An affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety … remarkable’ CELIA PAUL

‘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.