The considerable charm of Miriam Toews’ fiction comes, in part, from her ability to create characters in situations of long-term duress with a brilliantly emulsified mix of repression and humour, punctuated by bursts of real emotion. In this, her first novel since nabbing the Governor General’s Award for A Complicated Kindness, Toews’ unsunny topic is mental illness – something on the periphery of, but never so solidly confronted in, her previous work. Read more…