A Complicated Kindness

Miriam Toews

Feb 2009 · Seal Books

About this ebook

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 small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir or churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village. Ministered with an iron fist by Nomi’s uncle Hans, a.k.a. The Mouth of Darkness, East Village is a town that’s tall on rules and short on fun: no dancing, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, recreational sex, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past nine o’clock.

As the novel begins, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back departures three years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister, and Trudie, her warm and spirited mother. She lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher whose love is unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect. Father and daughter deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray, a committed elder of the church, seeks to create an artificial sense of order by reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi favours chaos as she tries to blunt her pain through “drugs and imagination.” Together they live in a limbo of unanswered questions.

Nomi’s first person narrative shifts effortlessly between the present and the past. Throughout, in a voice both defiant and vulnerable, she offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love.

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and a Giller Prize finalist, A Complicated Kindness earned both critical acclaim and a long and steady position on our national bestseller lists.

Ratings and reviews

Very interesting insight on the mental issues faced by a young teenager living in a small Mennonite town. Is a tad depressing bc of the struggles she faces and her very negative view of the world around her. But I do recommend giving it a try... The author's writing style is very unique and compelling.

Loved it. There was wit, sarcasm, pictures painted with words, sorrow and a real connection to the main character, Nomi Nickels. It provoked thought, anger, empathy and even had me laughing out loud a couple times.

A difficult read. Realism is never an easy pill to swallow or digest but is necessary in small doses

About the author

MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one prior work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Several of her novels have been made into feature films, including All My Puny Sorrows and the Oscar-nominated Women Talking. Miriam Toews lives in Toronto.