Brief lines from the following works are gratefully quoted: here, from “And Death Shall Have no Dominion,” a poem by Dylan Thomas; here, from The Designated Mourner, a play by Wallace Shawn; here, from Guest of Reality, a novel by Par Lagerkvist; here, the line “what makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing—which is that life goes on” is a variation on a sentence from “Hiding in Plain Sight: Natalia Ginzburg’s Masterpiece,” an article by Cynthia Zara in the New Yorker, June 22, 2017; and here, from The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Miriam Toews is the author of seven previous, bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. Her books have been widely published internationally, and adapted for stage and film. Among other honours, she is the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.