A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

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.

28 Aug 2025 | HB | 9780008722845 | £16.99

If you’re an independent bookseller in the UK or Ireland and you’d like an advance reading copy of A Truce That Is Not Peace please send your request, along with your name and bookshop address, to the IndieThinking team on independentthinking@harpercollins.co.uk

Other Articles

A Scar in the Bone by Sophie Jordan

In this explosive enemies-to-lovers romantasy sequel to the Sunday Times bestselling A Fire in the Sky, the fate of magic rests on one warrior’s shoulders – but it could cost her everything … Read More

One of Us by Elizabeth Day

The compulsively thrilling new novel about privilege, power and revenge from Sunday Times bestselling author Read More

The Peak by Sam Guthrie

The Diplomat meets Black Doves in this heady espionage thriller set across Canberra, Hong Kong and Beijing. Read More