Swing Low

"In the crucible of Toews' genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life." -Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews throws her voice to explore her father's experience with bipolar disorder in a small Mennonite community.

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. In this moving meditation on illness, family, faith, and love, Mel's daughter, critically acclaimed novelist Miriam Toews, recounts her father's life as he might have told it, right up to the day of his final walk.

Personal and touching, a stirring counterpart to her novel Irma Voth for readers of Susan Cheever and Mary Karr, Swing Low is an elegiac ode to a difficult life by an author drawing from the deepest wells of insight and emotion.