Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“Here comes Fight Night, by Miriam Toews of Women Talking! 3 gens of ornery, funny gals, including the 9 year old narrator. Sets standards for grandmotherly swearing and outspokenness I can never hope to match. Go Grandma Elvira!” Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
Review
“Fierce and funny, this gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family... a knockout.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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”
Review
“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
Review
“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
About the Author
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.