Awards
2004 Governor General's Award Winner
2004 Giller Prize Shortlist
Synopses & Reviews
"Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi tells us at the beginning of
A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but a dull, oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.
This moving, darkly funny novel is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of her eccentric, touching family as it falls apart, each member on a collision course with the only community they have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer poised to take the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.
Review
"Miriam Toews has written a novel shot through with aching sadness, the spectre of loss, and unexpected humor....It might seem an odd metaphor to use about someone who has authored such a vivid, anguished indictment of religious fundamentalism, but Miriam Toews writes like an angel." David Rakoff, author of Fraud
Review
"Toews recreates the stultifying world of an exasperated Mennonite teenager in a small town where nothing happens with mesmerizing authenticity." Toronto Star
Review
"The narrative voice is so strong, it could carry the least eventful, least weird adolescence in the world and still be as transfixing.... Toews' novel is a wonderfully acute, moving, warm, sceptical, frustrated portrait of fundamentalist religion....The book is fascinating, and resonant, and inexorable..." The Guardian (UK)
Review
"A Complicated Kindness is a delight from beginning to end. The humour might be of the blackest sort ('People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event.'), but the cumulative effect is liberating and defiantly joyful." Daily Mail
Review
"Wise, edgy, unforgettable, the heroine of Miriam Toews' knockout novel is Canada's next classic." The Globe and Mail
Review
"A Complicated Kindness is affecting, impeccably written, and has real authority, but most of all it is immediate. You as they say are there...like waking up in a crazy Bible camp, or witnessing an adolescent tour guide tear off her uniform and make a break for the highway. Quill & Quire
Review
"A Complicated Kindness struck me like a blow to the solar plexus. Toews, somewhat like Mordecai Richler, makes you feel the pain of her protagonist while elucidating the predicament of her people, always mixing a large dose of empathy with her iconoclastic sense of the ridiculous." Pat Donnelly, The Gazette (Montreal)
Review
"In a novel full of original characters...Toews has created a feisty but appealing young heroine....As an indictment against religious fundamentalism, A Complicated Kindness is timely. As a commentary on character it is fresh and inventive, and as storytelling it is first rate." The London Free Press
About the Author
Miriam Toews is the author of two novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal and winner of the John Hirsch Award) and A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award) and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine, and has won the National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg.