Fight Night

Staff Top Fives 2020-2021

Our favorite books of 2020-2021.

All I can say is that Miriam Toews has done it again — I absolutely loved this book. Swiv and her grandma are my new favorite characters, and I only wish I could've hung out with them for longer. Hilarious and heartfelt and perfect. Recommended By Carrie K., Powells.com

I eagerly anticipate each and every new book by Miriam Toews, one of my favorite writers. Toews’s books always feel fresh and new, with one consistency: they open your heart and your mind. In Fight Night, you will fall in love with the vivid protagonists Swiv and her grandma Elvira and you’ll laugh out loud and be moved to tears. Recommended By Kim S., Powells.com

I have long been a fan of Toews, but this one surprised me in the best way. I completely fell in love with Swiv and her sassy grandma — they make the best power couple! I can't think of a book that made me laugh out loud more times, while simultaneously being thought-provoking, insightful, and heartwarming. I still miss these characters and I only wish I could experience them again for the first time. Recommended By Carrie K., Powells.com

How my bookseller heart leapt when I heard there was a new Miriam Toews novel on the horizon! This tender, funny family portrait, narrated by nine-year-old Swiv in a letter to her estranged father, had me in stitches and in tears and introduced me to a grandmother I won’t soon forget. Recommended By Tove H., Powells.com

From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply human new novel about three generations of women.

When Swiv is temporarily kicked out of school, her grandma gives her an assignment to write a letter to her absent father. Swiv’s assignment to Grandma is to write a letter to Gord, her unborn grandchild and Swiv’s brother or sister. “You are a small thing,” Grandma writes to Gord, “but you must learn to fight.” Grandma has been fighting all her life: from her upbringing in a strictly religious community, ruled over by the odious Will Braun, she has fought the people who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit; she has fought to protect her family, and she has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. Swiv’s mother, too, is fighting “on every front,” as Grandma puts it, “Internally. Externally.”

Fight Night is a love letter to the mothers and grandmothers who have raised us, and to all the women who know what it costs to live in this world, but who are still finding a way — painfully, ferociously — to live on their own terms.

“[A] charming, open-hearted book... Funny and sad and exquisitely tender.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A relentlessly entertaining novel about three generations of women living under one roof, most of it rambunctiously reported by Swiv. While you will find Toews’ trademark themes of survival and community here, this novel is an absurdist comedy that will make you giggle into your soup.” Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2021”

“In Fight Night as in her previous books, Miriam Toews is a genius. Her gigantic mind and heart are singular; her sentence-making powers, extraordinary. Living in a time when Toews is writing is a reason to rejoice.” R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“Fight Night is a headlong rush of a novel narrated by a precocious eight-year-old girl who is doing everything she can to keep her troubled mother from falling apart and her irrepressible grandmother alive. Tender, heart-wrenching, darkly funny, and ultimately joyful, this novel pulses with life.” Christina Baker Kline, bestselling author of The Exiles and Orphan Train

Watch the Powell’s virtual event with Miriam Toews and Laura van den Berg!

Miriam Toews is the author of seven previous bestselling novels, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is 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 Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.