Toews's first novel, The Summer of My Amazing Luck, finds humour and poignancy in unexpected locales. The protagonist is a teenaged single mother, on welfare, who moves to a low-income housing project in Winnipeg to escape the emotional trauma left in the wake of her own mother's death. Toews invokes, ridicules, and defies class-based stereotypes in her portrayal of these lively characters' daily struggles, from cheap strollers to lost love, and joys. This book won the 1996 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer, and was adapted into an award winning drama by playwright Chris Craddock.

A single mother and absent parents also figure in Toews's second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding, winner of the 1998 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Set in Algren, Manitoba, the plot follows the homecoming of Knute McCloud and her daughter, Summer Feelin'. Algren is a place with more than its share of eccentric inhabitants, but Toews is the gentlest of satirists, creating affection in her readers for her ridiculous characters and their foibles.

Toews won the 2000 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction and a second McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for her biographical memoir, Swing Low: A Life. The life she describes here is that of her father, whose voice she adopts as she recounts his heroic struggle with bipolar disease, at a time and in a place with little understanding of mental illness.

A much grimmer view of small town life emerges in Toews's 2004 A Complicated Kindness, a work precariously balanced on the intersection of comedy and tragedy. Set in the small Mennonite town of East Village - a thinly fictionalized Steinbach - the narrator is 16-year-old Nomi Nickel. Reeling from the loss of her older sister and mother, Nomi and her father struggle to make sense of their past and to find a way forward into what seems to be a dark and limited future. Nomi is both astutely witty and heartbreakingly vulnerable in her bluntly honest observations of her self, her family, and her town. Toews describes the book as "a critique, essentially, of fundamentalism and that particular culture of control and punishment." Shortlisted for the SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE, the novel won the GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD, and was chosen as the novel that all Canadians should read in the 2006 Canada Reads competition.

Author KAREN GRANDY

Links to Other Sites
Miriam Toews
A Random House author spotlight on writer Miriam Toews.

Author Profile: Miriam Toews
An author profile of Miriam Toews from Quill & Quire Magazine.