Book of the Week: A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE by Miriam Toews
“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 — reveals new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She realsies she has been keeping up a decades-old internal correspondence with her sister, using her writing to fill a silence she barely understands. Inventive yet controlled; wrenching and joyful, in A Truce That Is Not Peace Toews remakes her world and invents an astonishing new literary form to contain it.