Fight Night: 'A Gem: humour and hope in the face of suffering' Observer

Description

'Sets standards for grandmotherly swearing and outspokenness I can never hope to match. Go Grandma Elvira!' - MARGARET ATWOOD You are a small thing, and you must learn to fight. Swiv has taken her grandmother's advice too literally. Now she's at home, suspended from school. Mom is pregnant and preoccupied - and so Swiv is in the older woman's charge, receiving a very different form of education from a teacher with a style all her own. Grandma likes her stories fast, troublesome and funny. She's known the very worst that life can throw at you - and has met it every time with a wild, unnamable spirit, fighting for joy and independence every step of the way. But will maths lessons based on Amish jigsaws and classes on How to Dig a Winter Grave inspire the same fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out? Time is running short. Grandma's health is failing, the baby is on the way, as a family of three extraordinary women prepare to face life's great changes together. 'Fight Night is glorious: funny and sad and beautifully written.' - SARAH MOSS

Miriam Toews is the author of six bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, and All My Puny Sorrows, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/ Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

'Wickedly funny and fearlessly honest.' The New Yorker 'The last book that made me cry.' JOSHUA FERRIS 'A love letter to our brave and brilliant matriarchs.' Glamour