All My Puny Sorrows

Miram Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows – Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read

Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.

Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.

Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.

When Elf’s latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.

Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities.

‘The novel she has written – so exquisitely that you’ll want to savour every word – reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.’ Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

‘[Miriam Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.’ Daily Mail

‘Toews takes her place alongside Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Mordicai Richler as the loveliest quintet of Canadian writing.’ Los Angeles Times