A Truce That Is Not Peace

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2025

‘The best memoir you will read all year’ NICK HORNBY

‘A triumph – a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence’ GUARDIAN

‘Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable’ ZADIE SMITH

‘Darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny’ MARIE CLAIRE

A book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman and Irish Times.

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.

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

‘[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

‘This is memoir perfection … I adored it’ Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone

‘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

‘Toews has done something very rare: shown us a true inner world’ Samuel Graydon, author of Einstein in Time and Space

‘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