Swing Low: A Life

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews recounts her father’s life as he might have told it, right up to his final day.

One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. A loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and an immensely popular school teacher, Mel was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggling with bipolar disorder, he could no longer face the ruptures in his world. Swing Low is an elegiac ode to a life by an author drawing from the deepest wells of insight and emotion.

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, Fight Night, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, and the nonfiction work A Truce That Is Not Peace. She is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.