Toews' new genre-bending memoir-an astute reflection on both the significance and the inadequacy of language, a bittersweet and often wry retelling of impactful moments from her life, and a profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss-is nothing short of a masterpiece . . . Right from the start, A Truce That Is Not Peace reads like a whirling dervish of unbridled longing, bewilderment, sadness, anger, regret and joy that picks you up, swirls you around and doesn't let up until the dance, the storm-and, yes, the journey-is done.

The San Francisco Chronicle

Revelatory . . . Like much of Toews' fiction, it is as fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic . . . This is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, or Alexandra Fuller's Fi: written not from the trenches of fresh loss but from the steadier perch of a generation-long hindsight.

New York Times Book Review

In this lyrical memoir, Toews explores her writing career with storytelling that is at once propulsive and recursive, using her work as evidence of both her success and her inability to escape her past. It's bracing, candid reading.

The Los Angeles Times, "30 Must-Read Books for Summer"

A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated [Toews'] work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. . . The reader bobs along in the author's stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live.

The Atlantic

An incandescent read.

People Magazine, "Best Books of August"

Unforgettable . . . Using a loose associative structure, Toews brings to light her subconscious, showing how grief tangles itself throughout one's mind, becoming part of its very wiring . . . Toews can't answer the question 'Why do I write?' satisfactorily to the literary event organizer. Instead, she delivers us something far more valuable. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a guttural exhumation of grief that ultimately weighs the joys of living against its sorrows, and tries to figure out why some of us can't endure the math. Formally inventive and exquisitely executed, Toews' memoir shows us that bearing witness to one's own grief-however disjointed, morbid or painful it is-can grant reprieve.

Bookpage, starred review