Fight Night

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise new novel about three generations of women.

"You're a small thing," Grandma writes, "and you must learn to fight." Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send.

Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting-painfully, ferociously- for a way to live on their own terms.

Reviews

"Fierce and funny, this gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family... a knockout." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[A] charming, open-hearted book . . . Funny and sad and exquisitely tender." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"A relentlessly entertaining novel about three generations of women living under one roof, most of it rambunctiously reported by Swiv. While you will find Toews' trademark themes of survival and community here, this novel is an absurdist comedy that will make you giggle into your soup." --Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2021"

"A novel as moving as it is full of humor . . . As Susan Cole, in Now Magazine, says, 'Few authors mix humor and deep emotion with Toews's skill.'" --The Millions, "Most Anticipated"

"FIGHT NIGHT is a headlong rush of a novel narrated by a precocious nine-year-old girl who is doing everything she can to keep her troubled mother from falling apart and her irrepressible grandmother alive. Tender, heart-wrenching, darkly funny, and ultimately joyful, this novel pulses with life." --Christina Baker Kline, bestselling author of THE EXILES and ORPHAN TRAIN

"In Fight Night as in her previous books, Miriam Toews is a genius. Her gigantic mind and heart are singular; her sentence-making powers, extraordinary. Living in a time when Toews is writing is a reason to rejoice." --R.O. Kwon, author of THE INCENDIARIES

"Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest... She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves." --The New Yorker

"Here comes Fight Night, by Miriam Toews of Women Talking! 3 gens of ornery, funny gals, including the 9 year old narrator. Sets standards for grandmotherly swearing and outspokenness I can never hope to match. Go Grandma Elvira!" --Margaret Atwood via Twitter

"A feminist manifesto that delicately unwraps the horror, but also bubbles with the love and wry humor that has endeared Toews to her readers . . . Toews' celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak. . . Did I mention the book is funny Wickedly so, with Toews's brand of seditious wit." --The New York Times on WOMEN TALKING

"An astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I've read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come." --Lauren Groff, author of FATES AND FURIES on WOMEN TALKING

"Irresistible... its intelligence, its honesty and, above all, its compassion provide a kind of existential balm-a comfort not unlike the sort you might find by opening a bottle of wine and having a long conversation with (yes, really) a true friend." --Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review on ALL MY PUNY SORROWS

"Astonishing . . . a work of deep moral intelligence, a master class in ethics beautifully dressed as a novel. . . . The intelligence on display in Women Talking is as ferocious as it is warm." --NPR.org

Author Bio

Miriam Toews is the author of seven previous bestselling novels, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is 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 Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto