Swing Low A Life

In the small Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, an elementary school teacher, husband, and father of three is engaged in a no-longer-private battle. All his life, Miriam Toews's father has stoically managed to reign in his manic depression, taming it through stringent routine and devotion to his work and family. Now that discipline is coming undone. In a masterpiece of literary empathy, Toews takes on her father's voice, creating a fictional memoir of his consciousness, his demons, and his memories. In doing so, she imagines the lonely, inconceivable path that led to his decision to take his own life. We follow him through his last days in the hospital, where his condition is mistreated by the ill-equipped staff, and flash back to various episodes in his life-be they mundane, formative, secret, or cherished. Toews brings to light the superhuman will it took her father merely to survive, lending the almost unbearable beauty of her writing to the task of bidding him a final good-bye. A Complicated Kindness (Counterpoint, 2004), in stores now and already in its 4th printing, was the winner of the Governor General's Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Like Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and William Styron's Darkness Visible, SWING LOW is a subtle and complex meditation on illness, faith, family, love, and obligation.Toews, Miriam is the author of 'Swing Low A Life', published 2006 under ISBN 9781559707787 and ISBN 155970778X.