believed that reading and writing and reason were the tickets to paradise.” That heretical attitude puts him constantly at odds with the censorious leaders of the town. We told her to try harder.”) Their father is “an oddball, a quiet depressive, studious guy who. In the opening pages of “All My Puny Sorrows,” we meet the Von Riesen sisters, restless adolescents in East Village, a Mennonite community established as “a godly refuge from the vices of the world.” (“Our old Sunday school teacher told us that she loved us but that God loved us more. In the crucible of her genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life. Those readers and critics up north are responding to the alchemy of Toews’s storytelling, which looks so deceptively modest on the surface. The novel was a finalist for the Giller Prize, and last week it won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Gimme a break! Get on with it!”Īnd yet, Canadians have pushed “All My Puny Sorrows” up the bestseller list. “We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad.

I know, I know, what could sound less appealing than an almost plotless novel about the grinding stone of suicidal depression? Even the narrator’s mom says she has had it with novels about sad protagonists. This is the story of a little group - “a tainted family, deranged” - that revolves around a woman determined to kill herself. And now comes this unbearably sad, improbably witty novel inspired by the suicides of her father and only sister.

Her next book, “ The Flying Troutmans,” drove us through comedy and pathos on a strange family road trip. I’ve been in love with Toews since 2004, when she published “ A Complicated Kindness,” a wincingly funny story about a 16-year-old girl trapped in a small Mennonite town.

As that discussion continues in homes, legislatures and places of worship, please make room for “ All My Puny Sorrows,” by Canadian writer Miriam Toews. The story of Brittany Maynard, the terminally ill woman in Oregon who committed suicide earlier this month after making her intention public, forces us to consider - or repress - wrenching questions about how life ends.

All my puny sorrows summary