Miriam Toews reads from "All My Puny Sorrows"

“Miriam Toews writes like an angel.”--David Rakoff

All My Puny Sorrows is the latest novel from Miriam Toews, one of Canada's bestselling and most beloved authors not only because her work is rich with deep human feeling and compassion, but because her observations are knife-sharp and her books wickedly funny. All My Puny Sorrows  is Toews at her finest: a story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.

Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's is an enviable life (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close—raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her own life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart, how to keep her own heart from breaking, and what it means to love someone who wants to die.

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Miriam Toews is the author of five previous novels: A Complicated Kindness, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Toronto.