"Revelatory." --New York Times Book Review
"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." --Laura van den Berg
"Nothing short of a masterpiece.” --The San Francisco Chronicle

Named a Must-Read Book of the Summer by The Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, and Town & Country

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write--a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews--all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer--surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, 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.

Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane--this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.