About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
Miriam Toews's #1 national bestseller about two unforgettable sisters and and a love that illuminates life.
Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters leading very different lives. Elfreida is a renowned pianist, wealthy, and happily married. Her younger sister Yolandi is a writer, divorced, broke, and forever chasing after the wrong men in her search for true love. But Elf is struggling with her demons, and Yoli doesn't know what to do. Elf wants to die and wants Yoli to help her. Yoli desperately wants her sister to live. Three weeks before her highly-anticipated international tour, Elf lands in the hospital after her latest suicide attempt. There's doubt that she will be well in time, but Elf doesn't seem to care. As the bounds of the sisters' love for each other are tested, Yoli faces a decision that will forever change her life—and Elf's.
A multi-award-winning, critically acclaimed masterpiece, All My Puny Sorrows shows Toews at the height of her craft, making you smile while she breaks your heart.
Contributor Notes
MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of many bestselling novels: Fight Night, 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 non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
Awards
- Short-listed, Wellcome Trust Book Prize
- Winner, Canadian Authors Association Literary Award
- Short-listed, Folio Fiction/Poetry Awards
- Winner, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
- Short-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
Editorial Review
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Prize
Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
"Toews’s brave novel All My Puny Sorrows is a high-wire act. What do you do when your beloved and brilliant sister wants you to help her leave this world because she finds her existence too painful? How do you make that into a believable, excruciating but sometimes wildly funny work of fiction? This book would be helpful to those left behind by a loved one’s deliberate departure, too." —Margaret Atwood
"[This is a] poignant, powerful and ultimately uplifting book." —Ottawa Citizen
"Brilliant. . . . Delicate braids of sadness and humour. Her most accomplished novel yet." —The Globe and Mail
"Poignant, heartbreaking, yet suffused with wit. . . . A stellar achievement. . . . A superb offering from a writer of rare originality and undisputed talent." —The London Free Press
"Powerful and ultimately uplifting." —Ottawa Citizen
"Her fans will not be disappointed." —Waterloo Region Record
