Synopses & Reviews
“Audacious,original and profoundly moving . . . . Healing is a likely outcome of a bookimbued with the righteous anger, compassion and humanity of
Swing Low.”—
Globe and Mail (Canada)
Reverberatingwith emotional power, authenticity, and insight, Swing Low isMiriam Toews' daring and deeply affecting memoir ofher fathers struggle with manic depression in a small Mennonite community inrural Canada. Personal and touching, a stirring counterpart to her novel IrmaVoth and reminiscent of works by Susan Cheever,Gail Caldwell, Mary Karr, and Alexandra Styron, Swing Low is an elegiacode to a difficult life by an author drawing from the deepest well of insight,craft, and emotion.
Review
“…Toews offers a touching memoir.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“The magic of Swing Low is that Toews makes a life that looked ordinary, even grindingly so, seem exalted.” Maria Russo, New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. A loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and an immensely popular schoolteacher, Mel was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggling with bipolar disorder, he could no longer face the darkness that clouded his world. In this moving meditation on illness, family, faith, and love, Mels daughter, critically acclaimed novelist and reporter Miriam Toews, recounts her fathers life as he would have told it, in his own voice, right up to the day of his final walk.
Swing Low is a bold, gracefully written, and compassionate recounting of one mans heartbreaking battle with depression.
About the Author
Miriam Toews was born in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published five novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards in Canada, including the Governor Generals Literary Award (for A Complicated Kindness) and the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize (for The Flying Troutmans). In 2010 she received the prestigious Writers Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Irma Voth is Toewss most recent novel. She lives in Toronto.