Miriam Toews in Conversation With Laura van den Berg

From Miriam Toews, bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, comes 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 (Bloomsbury) 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. Toews will be joined in conversation by Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.

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