Miriam Toews

Una entrañable novela sobre el amor eterno entre hermanas Las vidas de las hermanas Von Riesen no podrían ser más dispares. La existencia de Elfrieda parece perfecta: es una pianista de renombre internacional, una mujer glamurosa y felizmente casada. La de Yolandi, en cambio, es un verdadero desastre: en pleno divorcio, a duras penas logra llegar a fin de mes y siente que sus hijos adolescentes crecen demasiado deprisa. Y sin embargo Elf no quiere seguir viviendo, mientras que Yoli daria lo que fuera por mantener a su hermana mayor con vida. Sentada junto a la cama de Elf en el hospital tras su ultimo intento de suicidio, y mientras lidia con sus propias pequeñas desgracias, Yoli se pregunta como transmitirle a su hermana la fuerza necesaria para seguir adelante, como resistir ella misma con el corazon hecho pedazos y, en definitiva, como ayudar a alguien que desea morir. Pequeñas desgracias sin importancia guarda un equilibrio perfecto entre lo entrañable y lo desgarrador, entre la comedia y la tragedia. El genio literario de Miriam Toews logra lo imposible: desarmarnos y hacernos reir en la cara de la desgracia. Una novela cautivadora, tierna e inteligente, cuya memorable protagonista, Yoli, lucha con todas sus fuerzas contra lo inevitable, poniendo de relieve lo fragil que es nuestra existencia y contagiando al lector un poderosisimo anhelo de vivir. ¿Que hacer cuando tu maravillosa y querida hermana te pide que la ayudes a dejar este mundo porque la existencia le resulta intolerable? Una novela valiente y, aunque dolorosa, tremendamente divertida: toda una exhibicion sobre la cuerda floja. Margaret Atwood Una novela irresistible? Su inteligencia, su honestidad y sobre todo su compasion proporcionan una especie de balsamo existencial, un consuelo no muy diferente al que nos procuraria abrir una buena botella de vino y disfrutar de una larga charla con un viejo amigo. The New York Times Toews es un talento de primer orden. The Guardian Audaz, descarada y de gran corazon... Toews escribe desde el punto de vista de Yoli, cuyo monologo interior parece un cruce entre David Foster Wallace y Robin Williams si ambos fueran, de hecho, una cuarentona menonita que tuviera problemas con la autoridad. Es una sabelotodo con corazon, una filosofa con el tempo de un comico. The Dallas Morning News

L'Elf i la Yoli són dues germanes intel·ligents i ben avingudes. L'Elfrieda és una pianista de renom mundial, encantadora, rica i feliçment casada: vol morir. La Yolandi está divorciada, li costa arribar a fi de mes amb el sou que guanya i se'n va al llit amb els homes equivocats mentre mira de trobar el veritable amor: vol desesperadament mantenir la seva germana gran amb vida. Pero l'ultim intent de sucidi de l'Elf es un xoc: es a tres setmanes de l'inici de la seva esperada gira internacional. Podra recuperar la salut a temps? A mesura que la situacio es torna cada vegada mes complicada, la Yoli s'enfronta a la decisio mes esferedora de la seva vida: ajudar la seva germana a morir.

Las vidas de las hermanas Von Riesen no podrían ser más dispares. La existencia de Elfrieda parece perfecta: es una pianista de renombre internacional, una mujer glamurosa y felizmente casada. La de Yolandi, en cambio, es un verdadero desastre: en pleno divorcio, a duras penas logra llegar a fin de mes y siente que sus hijos adolescentes crecen demasiado deprisa. Y sin embargo Elf no quiere seguir viviendo, mientras que Yoli daria lo que fuera por mantener a su hermana mayor con vida.Sentada junto a la cama de Elf en el hospital tras su ultimo intento de suicidio, y mientras lidia con sus propias pequeñas desgracias, Yoli se pregunta como transmitirle a su hermana la fuerza necesaria para seguir adelante, como resistir ella misma con el corazon hecho pedazos y, en definitiva, como ayudar a alguien que desea morir.Pequeñas desgracias sin importancia guarda un equilibrio perfecto entre lo entrañable y lo desgarrador, entre la comedia y la tragedia. El genio literario de Miriam Toews logra lo imposible: desarmarnos y hacernos reir en la cara de la desgracia. Una novela cautivadora, tierna e inteligente, cuya memorable protagonista, Yoli, lucha con todas sus fuerzas contra lo inevitable, poniendo de relieve lo fragil que es nuestra existencia y contagiando al lector un poderosisimo anhelo de vivir.

Elvira, la abuela de Swiv, lleva toda la vida luchando. Criada en una estricta comunidad religiosa, tuvo que luchar contra aquellos que querían arrebatarle su independencia y sus ganas de salir adelante. Ahora, en la recta final de su vida, debe luchar contra el paso del tiempo, los achaques y las adversidades que afectan a su familia. Su hija, una actriz deslenguada y de temperamento voluble, afronta el tercer trimestre de su embarazo al tiempo que trata de lidiar con un pasado y un presente amargos. Swiv, su nieta, es una niña de nueve años con un mundo interior fascinante, pero que acaba de ser expulsada del colegio por meterse en peleas. En la escuela improvisada que montan en casa, Elvira se propone enseñarle a su nieta que existen distintas formas de pelear y que lo mas importante es no dejar que se apague el fuego que arde en su interior. Escrita como una carta de amor a las abuelas, No dejar que se apague el fuego es una novela llena de ternura, honestidad y buen humor. Con el talento al que nos tiene acostumbrados, Miriam Toews consigue inocularnos su particular vision de la vida y las desdichas, y hace que nos enamoremos de tres mujeres valientes, tres luchadoras incansables pertenecientes a tres generaciones distintas. En esta historia confluyen lo tragico y lo comico, la lucha y los cuidados, las vacaciones y los partidos de beisbol, los traumas y los afectos; en definitiva, todos los elementos que componen la vida de una familia comun, que sin embargo no renuncia a su magnifica singularidad.

Yolanda is conflicted. Her sister Elf has battled depression for her whole adult life, and is in a psychiatric ward under permanent observation after attempting suicide - again. Yolanda has always looked up to Elf as her talented and beautiful older sister. She loves her with a fierce passion and wants to believe in the possibility of a future together, one in which Elf gets better. But it's looking unlikely and Yolanda has to decide; if the person you love is tired of living, is it kinder just to let them go? All My Puny Sorrows (a line from a Coleridge poem) is written out of Miriam Toews' personal experience and is, in some ways, a grown-up version of A Complicated Kindness, the novel that catapulted Toews to her bestselling status in Canada. This story allows Toews' beguiling narrative voice - her easy, snappy, darkly comic intimacy - to sing through.

Heartbreaking and funny, the new novel from one of Canada´s bestselling and best-loved authors centres on a family in search of itself. Sharp and quirky, with a unique comic voice, this is the story of the Troutmans. Hattie returns home from Paris suddenly, to care for her sister Min´s children wile she recovers on a psychiatric ward. Hattie hatches a plan to find the kids´long-lost father, and they pile into the family van, setting off across the country.

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks-waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why-their stories were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.' Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home. How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another-and Miriam Toews makes them the questions we must all ask ourselves.

From the acclaimed Giller Prize Finalist and Governor General's Award Winner comes her delightfully funny and charming second novel about life in Canada's smallest town.

Her uncle, known as The Mouth, is head of the church, responsible for the harsh laws and cruel 'shunning', yet that doesn't stop Nomi falling for the town's most unsuitable boy - Travis. In such a secretive and god-fearing community, Nomi finds it impossible to find ways to express her many and growing passions. And despite her wish to keep everything together and look after her father, Nomi finds herself drawn towards revelations and self destruction, with Travis at her side. A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family in this insightful, irreverent coming-of-age novel. In bleak rural Manitoba, Nomi longs for her older sister, Tash ('she was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny'), and mother, Trudie, each of whom has recently fled fundamentalist Christianity and their town. Her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, isn't much of a sounding board as Nomi plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a 'kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions.' Once a 'curious, hopeful child' Nomi now relies on biting humor as her life spins out of control—she stops attending school, shaves her head and wanders around in a marijuana-induced haze—while Ray sells off most of their furniture, escapes on all-night drives and increasingly withdraws into himself. Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair. Though the narration occasionally unravels into distracting stream of consciousness, the unsentimental prose and the poignant character interactions sustain reader interest. Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both.

Nomi Nickel lives with her father, Ray, in East Village, a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. She dreams of escaping to the big city, but since her mother and sister left home, it's hard to imagine leaving her father behind. As she begins to piece together the story behind her mother's disappearance, she finds herself on a direct collision course with the town's minister. With fierce originality and brilliance, Miriam Toews takes us straight to the centre of Nomi's world and the complicated kindness at the heart of family life. A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family in this insightful, irreverent coming-of-age novel. In bleak rural Manitoba, Nomi longs for her older sister, Tash ('she was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny'), and mother, Trudie, each of whom has recently fled fundamentalist Christianity and their town. Her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, isn't much of a sounding board as Nomi plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a 'kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions.' Once a 'curious, hopeful child' Nomi now relies on biting humor as her life spins out of control—she stops attending school, shaves her head and wanders around in a marijuana-induced haze—while Ray sells off most of their furniture, escapes on all-night drives and increasingly withdraws into himself. Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair. Though the narration occasionally unravels into distracting stream of consciousness, the unsentimental prose and the poignant character interactions sustain reader interest. Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both.

This book is shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015. It is a 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' 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).

Shes known the very worst that life can throw at you - and has met it every time with a wild, unnamable spirit, fighting for joy and independence every step of the way. Grandmas health is failing, the baby is on the way, as a family of three extraordinary women prepare to face lifes great changes together.

Miram Toews's All My Puny Sorrows - Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read

Nomi Nickel vive en una comunidad menonita canadiense, donde las normas son cada día más estrictas para evitar las contaminaciones del mundo exterior y ya ni siquiera llegan los trenes. Ella sueña con vivir en el East Village de Nueva York, es una adolescente con las feroces ganas de vivir y la candida iconoclastia que corresponden a su edad, una Holden Caulfield entre fundamentalistas amables. Puede que Tash, la hermana mayor, se fuera de la ciudad con su novio, pero Trudie, la madre, desaparecio una noche. Nomi vive ahora con su padre, un profesor bondadoso que no se sobrepone a las perdidas. Nomi se enamorara, descubrira el sexo, las drogas y hasta el rock and roll, seguira haciendose preguntas sobre la desaparicion de su madre y de su hermana e ira acercandose a la verdad. Premio Governor General, Premio Margaret Lawrence y Premio al Mejor libro del año otorgado por los libreros canadienses.

You are a small thing, and you must learn to fight.Swiv has taken her grandmother's advice too literally. Now she's at home, suspended from school. Mom is pregnant and preoccupied - and so Swiv is in the older woman's charge, receiving a very different form of education from a teacher with a style all her own.Grandma likes her stories fast, troublesome and funny. She's known the very worst that life can throw at you - and has met it every time with a wild, unnamable spirit, fighting for joy and independence every step of the way. But will maths lessons based on Amish jigsaws and classes on How to Dig a Winter Grave inspire the same fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out?Time is running short. Grandma's health is failing, the baby is on the way, as a family of three extraordinary women prepare to face life's great changes together.

Durante años, en la recóndita colonia menonita de Molotschna, decenas de mujeres fueron sistemáticamente drogadas y violadas mientras dormían. Despertaban doloridas y sangrando. La comunidad se empeñaba en mantener que todo era producto de su absurda imaginación, o quizá obra del demonio, que las castigaba por sus pecados. Los violadores, sin embargo, eran hombres de la propia colonia: tíos, hermanos o vecinos que finalmente acabaron en prisión pero que ahora, en apenas dos días, quedarán libres bajo fianza y regresarán a casa.Ocho de esas mujeres que padecieron abusos y violaciones están a punto de reunirse en secreto para tomar una decisión que determinará su futuro. ¿Qué deben hacer? ¿Perdonarlos, como pide el obispo Peters? ¿Responder a la violencia con más violencia? ¿O marcharse para siempre, lejos del único mundo que hasta ahora han conocido?En el punto en el que estas ocho mujeres -ancianas, jóvenes o niñas, todas ellas singulares y genuinas- toman la palabra y comienzan a compartir sus dudas, su ira y sus aspiraciones, arranca esta formidable novela, inspirada en hechos reales que ocurrieron hace tan sólo una década. En Ellas hablan, Miriam Toews narra con enorme hondura, afecto y sentido del humor la historia de unas mujeres que reclaman su derecho a decidir, y se hacen preguntas que no distan tanto de las que todos nos hacemos sobre la convivencia, el perdón, la justicia y la naturaleza del amor.