Miriam Toews, the beloved and incomparable author of Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness, returns with a funny, smart masterwork about wit, perseverance, loss, storytelling and love in an unusual family.
Fight Night is told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a girl living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv’s absent father. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assigment : to write a letter to «Gord», her unborn grandchild (and Swiv’s soon-to-be sibling). «You’re a small thing», Grandma writes to Gord, «and you must learn how to fight.»
As Swiv records her thoughts and observations, Fight Night unspools the pain, love, laughter and fierce will to live across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv’s wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel : someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way to fight to the end for those she loves, on her own terms.
