Font size options
Increase or decrease the font size for this website by clicking on the 'A's.
Contrast options
Choose a color combination to give the most comfortable
contrast.
Author of A Truce That Is Not Peace
In this breathtaking memoir of stunning emotional force and electrifying honesty, one of Canada's most iconic writers tells her own story for the first time in an attempt to answer the question, "Why do you write?"
With each attempt at an answer, Toews realizes she has been keeping up an internal correspondence with her beloved sibling, attempting to fill a silence she can barely comprehend. As Toews turns to face that silence, we come to see that the question “why I write” is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. A masterwork of non-fiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly original yet intimately, powerfully precise; momentous, hilarious, wrenching, and joyful—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her personal world and inventing a brilliant literary form to hold it.
A Truce That Is Not Peace is a finalist for the 2025 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for nonfiction, the largest prize for nonfiction in Canada. The winner announcement is on November 13.
Event location: Port Nelson United Church, 3132 South Drive, Burlington
A Different Drummer Books will be on site with books for sale and signing after the talk.
Presented in partnership with Knopf Canada and A Different Drummer Books
Miriam Toews is the author of the multiple bestselling titles including Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, A Complicated Kindness, and one prior work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Several of her novels have been made into feature films, including All My Puny Sorrows and the Oscar-nominated Women Talking.
Explore Miriam Toews in our collection
If you need an accessibility accommodation during this program, please register early so we can confirm arrangements a few days before your visit.
Port Nelson United Church
3132 South Dr, Burlington, ON L7N 1H7
