Although a very tough subject matter, it is written beautifully. Yoli is her sister who desperately wants her to live. She also takes us on a heart-rending journey through her characters’ emotional landscapes, via the cruel terrain of despair in which Elf becomes stranded, shedding light on the darkest of places.Īll My Puny Sorrows is published by Faber (£7.99). Elfrieda is an accomplished pianist who wants to end her life and has attempted suicide many times. Toews evocatively conjures landscapes, from the small town in which the family live to the “dark, jagged outcroppings of the great Canadian Shield”. What holds this novel together, stops it from becoming saturated with sorrow, is a wit so sharp it hurts to laugh at certain scenes. Based on the international best-selling novel by Miriam Toews, ALL MY PUNY SORROWS unexpectedly infuses wry humour into this heart-wrenching story of two loving sisters: one a gifted pianist. All My Puny Sorrows is based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide, in 2010, 12 years after their father killed himself, explaining the novel’s urgency and rawness.

It is with a “loving attention to every detail” that their father built their house a quality also governing this novel, written by someone who knows what happens when things fall apart. “We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it down,” says Yoli. In the summer when the family “had a few days to kill” before they could move into their new house, they go camping in the “badlands of South Dakota”. All My Puny Sorrows is a novel about suicide, a 320-page contemplation of the point of human existence that asks why we bother slogging through our inevitable. The sisters’ father had built the house himself when he and his wife were “a newly married Mennonite couple”.

“Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979,” begins Yoli, the narrator. All My Puny Sorrows is the latest novel from Miriam Toews, one of Canadas 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.

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