A Complicated Kindness (24 page)

acknowledgments

Hearty thanks to Michael Schellenberg and his all-star editing abilities that combine a Zenlike calm with heat-seeking missile precision and to Carolyn Swayze for gently reminding me that writers write and to Paul Tough for reading earlier versions and to Cheryl Cohen for shepherding a thousand details to safety and of course, as ever, to NCR for guarding all the exits.

M
IRIAM
T
OEWS
is the author of two novels,
Summer of My Amazing Luck
(nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award) and
A Boy of Good Breeding
(winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award), and one work of non-fiction,
Swing Low: A Life
(winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC,
This American Life
(NPR),
Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters
and
The New York Times Magazine,
and has won the national magazine gold medal for humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Praise for
A Complicated Kindness

“This sad, bittersweet and oddball novel stands apart from the crowd. For her moving portrayal of how family ties can be ripped apart, Toews deserves to be up there with other top-notch writers—Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Yann Martel—who have come out of Canada over the past few years.”

—
Scotland on Sunday

“
A Complicated Kindness
is a delight from beginning to end. The humour might be of the blackest sort (‘People here just can’t wait to die, it seems. It’s the main event.’), but the cumulative effect is liberating and defiantly joyful.”

—
Daily Mail
(UK)

“Toews, somewhat like Mordecai Richler, makes you feel the pain of her protagonist while elucidating the predicament of her people, always mixing a large dose of empathy with her iconoclastic sense of the ridiculous. When she’s funny, she’s wickedly so.”

—
The Gazette
(Montreal)

“There is so much here that’s accomplished and fine. The momentum of the narrative, the quality of the storytelling, the startling images, the brilliant rendering of a time and place, the observant, cataloguing eye of the writer, her great grace. But if I had to name Miriam Toews’s crowning achievement, it would be the creation of Nomi Nickel, who deserves to take her place beside Daisy Goodwill Flett and Pi Patel and Hagar Shipley as a brilliantly realized character for whom the reader comes to care; okay, comes to love.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“Truly wonderful…one of the year’s exuberant reads. Toews recreates the stultifying world of an exasperated Mennonite teenager in a small town where nothing happens with mesmerizing authenticity…. Toews seduces the reader with her tenderness, astute observation and piquant humour. But then she turns the laughs she’s engendered in the reader like a knife.”

—
Toronto Star

“
A Complicated Kindness
, at its core, is a depiction of the battle between hope and despair…yet along the way we are treated to an unforgettable summer with a heroine who loses everything but is ultimately able to hold on to life, to a sense of herself and to maintain her courage and optimism in the face of a world without any guaranteed happy endings.”

—
The Georgia Straight

“There have been a lot of Holden Caulfield knockoffs since 1951, but few authors have been as successful as J. D. Salinger in channelling adolescent angst in a way that’s as charming as it is profound. Miriam Toews hits that elusive mark with her new novel. In fact,
A Complicated Kindness
just may be a future classic in its own right…. This is a wonderful book because it reminds us of the beauty and meaning in one small moment of one small life.”

—
Philadelphia Inquirer

“In a novel full of original characters…Toews has created a feisty but appealing young heroine…. As an indictment against religious fundamentalism,
A Complicated Kindness
is timely. As a commentary on character, it is fresh and inventive, and as storytelling it is first rate.”

—
The London Free Press

“Told with the slouchy, cool grace of a misfit teen, this sparkly novel is destined to become a coming-of-age classic.”

—
Elle
(UK)

“With uncanny accuracy, Toews captures the claustrophobia of a conservative Mennonite town. Over and over, she releases the tension of it with a direct comic hit.”

—
Literary Review of Canada

“Wry and saturated with comic invention,
A Complicated Kindness
possesses one of the strongest fictional voices since Holden Caulfield vented his spleen.”

—
Time Out
(UK)

“Scathing, bittersweet and twistedly funny…. A strikingly fresh and offbeat voice.”

—
The Seattle Times

Copyright © 2004 Miriam Toews

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Toews, Miriam, 1964–
A complicated kindness: a novel / Miriam Toews.

eISBN: 978-0-307-37115-7

I. Title.

PS8589.O6352C64 2007     C813'.54     C2006-907031-8

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