About Swing Low: A Life
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 6, 2011)
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 schoolteacher, Mel was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggling with bipolar disorder, he could no longer face the darkness that clouded his world. In this moving meditation on illness, family, faith, and love, Mel’s daughter, critically acclaimed novelist and reporter Miriam Toews, recounts her father’s life as he would have told it, in his own voice, right up to the day of his final walk.
Swing Low is a bold, gracefully written, and compassionate recounting of one man’s heartbreaking battle with depression.
Bloggers who sign up for this tour will also get a copy of Toews’ Irma Voth, should they so choose.
About Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews was born in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published five novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards in Canada, including the Governor General’s Literary Award (for A Complicated Kindness) and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (for The Flying Troutmans). In 2010 she received the prestigious Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Irma Voth is Toews’s most recent novel. She lives in Toronto.
Miriam’s Tour Stops
Tuesday, September 6th: Amusing Reviews
Monday, September 12th: Life is Short. Read Fast.
Tuesday, September 13th: A Bookish Way of Life
Wednesday, September 14th: Bookstack
Tuesday, September 20th: Life in Review
Thursday, September 22nd: The Lost Entwife
Thursday, September 22nd: In the Next Room