'The 20 stories in All We Want Is Everything are hard and unforgiving, dragging the reader bodily through a world in which factory machines mangle workers beyond repair and clouds of birds descend on a city, turning it into a toxic wasteland of filth and unbreathable air.'Ĭhad Pelley, in Telegraph-Journal/Salon writes: Write his name down because hopefully he’s going to be a big deal.' …It’s a startling debut by one of my new favourite writers whose promise is clear and future looks bright.

The writing is a clean right hook that lands with precision. 'All We Want Is Everything is a slim book but it is jammed with stories that drip with guts, bodily emissions, and heartache, told by narrators who long for a real connection. Click here to buy it for £5.Zoe Whittall, in The Globe and Mail writes: She also takes us on a heart-rending journey through her characters’ emotional landscapes, via the cruel terrain of despair in which Elf becomes stranded, shedding light on the darkest of places.Īll My Puny Sorrows is published by Faber (£7.99). Toews evocatively conjures landscapes, from the small town in which the family live to the “dark, jagged outcroppings of the great Canadian Shield”. What holds this novel together, stops it from becoming saturated with sorrow, is a wit so sharp it hurts to laugh at certain scenes. All My Puny Sorrows is based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide, in 2010, 12 years after their father killed himself, explaining the novel’s urgency and rawness. It is with a “loving attention to every detail” that their father built their house a quality also governing this novel, written by someone who knows what happens when things fall apart. “We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it down,” says Yoli. In the summer when the family “had a few days to kill” before they could move into their new house, they go camping in the “badlands of South Dakota”. The sisters’ father had built the house himself when he and his wife were “a newly married Mennonite couple”. “Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979,” begins Yoli, the narrator.

All my puny sorrows summary