Chapters: Fight Night by Miriam Toews June 2023
A literary free-for-all book discussion group.
June 13th 2023 7pm: Fight Night by Miriam Toews
- Fight Night byISBN: 9781635578171Publication Date: 2021-10-05"Move over, Scout Finch! There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "A revelation." -Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. "You're a small thing," Grandma writes, "and you must learn to fight." Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting--painfully, ferociously-- for a way to live on their own terms.
About the Author
Miriam Toews is the author of eight bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. Bio from Penguin Random House
Videos
Articles and Reviews
- New Yorker article by Alexandra SchwartzA Beloved Canadian Novelist Reckons with Her Mennonite Past by Alexandra Schwartz
March 18, 2019, New Yorker - NPR: Miriam Toews' latest novel offers ardent, funny lessons in staying and fightingOctober 7, 2021
By Kristen Martin - Miriam Toews’ new novel Fight Night pays tribute to her motherThe Globe and Mail
By Marsha Lederman
Published August 20, 2021