A Complicated Kindness - Softcover

The most engaging narrative voice I've come across lately (right up there with Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn) is that of Nomi, the teenage girl at the centre of Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness (Faber) - a darkly hilarious novel set in an oppressive Mennonite community. (Blake Morrison Holiday Reads, The Guardian 2005-06-18)

'Miriam Toews herself grew up in a Mennonite village, and is hilariously adept in her evocation of being stuck in a town with no bars ... A Complicated Kindess reads like born-agin Garrison Keillor ... It's a timely assault on the hypocrisy of religious fanaticism.' (Alfred Hickling Guardian 2005-06-04)

'The story veers between past and present, horror and hilarity, with Nomi's biting wit enhancing the ambient lunacy.' (Barbara Taylor London Review of Books 2005-06-02)

'Told with the slouchy, cool grace of a misfit teen, this sparkly novel is destined to become a coming-of-age classic.' (Elle)

'A fabulous coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in a repressive Mennonite community. Witty and wise.' (Louise Wener)

'This novel is exquisitely written and faceted. It combines impossible qualities effortlessly - is blithe and earnest, heartbreaking and humorous, and its expression is as raw as it is delicate. It is a story of family disintegration; faith's rupture, recovery, and reckoning; love's inhibiting aspects and liberty's damages. Toews creates a central voice that is adolescent and wise, haunted, disarming and endearing. From beginning to end the book is unusually calibrated and incredibly compelling.' (Sarah Hall Guardian)

'Wry and saturated with comic invention, A Complicated Kindness possesses one of the strongest fictional voices since Holden Caulfield vented his spleen.' (Time Out)

'The book's theme is the terrible disillusionment of growing up and realising your parents aren't perfect, happy or even likeable human beings. Toews' portrayal of the loving but atypically polite relationship between Nomi and her father, a lost soul since his wife and daughter left home, provides the core of the book and some of the best passages. ... This sad, bittersweet and oddball novel stands apart from the crowd. For her moving portrayal of how family ties can be ripped apart, Toews deserves to be up there with other top-notch writers - Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Yann Martel - who have come out of Canada over the past few years.' (Scotland on Sunday)

'... Toews spurns the temptation to submerge her characters in vitriol, taking a more complex road where there is much tenderness in a beautifully wrought narrative.' (The Herald (Glasgow) 2005-05-14)

'There's a real danger of sap in this kind of book, but Toews' narrator - an eye-rollingly sarky but confused teenager - more than saves the day. Nomi Nickel is 15 years old and living with her father in a strict Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada in the 1970s. Her spirited mum and sister have both disappeared into the outside world of which the sect so disapproves. Her quest to find out what happened, along with her first boyfriend, dope-smoking Travis, and her best friend, a strange, luminous invalid, is movingly and fascinatingly rendered.' (City Life)

We're Mennonites. As far as I know, we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager. Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City's East Village. Instead she's trapped in East Village, Manitoba: a town with no train station, no bar, and where job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir. Since her mother and sister have left home, Nomi lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher. Fighting against the restraints of the town, Nomi's longing for a future of opportunity and hope sets her on course towards a climax at once startling and inevitable.