A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews' sensation

Miriam Toews is the author of four novels and a memoir. A Complicated Kindness (2004), her third novel, spent over a year on the bestseller list in Canada, won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. In 2006 it was chosen as the book for "Canada Reads."

The novel is told in the voice of a teenager, Nomi Nickel, who lives in "East Village," a Mennonite town modeled on Toew's Mennonite hometown: Steinbach, Manitoba, which contains the Mennonite Heritage Center. Nomi's family life is falling apart. Both her older sister and her mother, excommunicated from the church, have left. She and her father try to work out a companionable existence, but Nomi gets little guidance from the beliefs she's absorbed from her Mennonite community or her kindly, but non-communicative family that lives on its margins.

For our first discussion on this book, we'll look at the beliefs Nomi has inherited or interpreted from her family and community--and the gaps between Mennonite belief and practice in this story.

Miriam Toews's other novels include:
The Summer of My Amazing Luck
A Boy of Good Breeding
The Flying Troutmans

Her memoir, Swing Low, chronicles her father's depression and suicide, and is written in his voice.

In 2007, Miriam Toews starred in a film by Carlos Reygada, Silent Light, set in Mexico among the Old Colony Mennonites. Read a review by Roger Ebert here.

Her new novel, Irma Voth, will be published by Harpercollins in September 2011. (It is based, in part, on her experience making ) Listen to her discuss it on Youtube.