Fight Night

Reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE

One of Indigo’s “Top 10 Best Canadian Fiction Books of 2021”

“Fresh and revelatory. . . . Miriam Toews is a master storyteller.” —The Globe and Mail

“[A] joyful, powerful, philosophical book. . . . It’s a profound affirmation of storytelling as a life force. . . . While life can be and is hard . . . what becomes obvious in Fight Night is that love wins out over everything.” —Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

 “Fierce and funny . . . gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family. It’s a knockout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] charming, open-hearted book. . . . Funny and sad and exquisitely tender.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Move over, Scout Finch! There’s a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv. She’s the nine-year-old narrator of Miriam Toews’ spectacular new novel, Fight Night and you’re not likely to forget her distinctive voice—wise, worried, precocious, profane—anytime soon. . . . Toews has written a big-hearted, briskly paced family saga about the extraordinary love that binds three generations of free-spirited women together, and the tools and techniques that they’ve had to develop to survive.” —USA Today

“Toews is a master of voice, and Swiv's . . . is one that I could read forever. . . . [A]s Elvira says, ‘To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy.’ This is an apt mission statement for Toews's body of work. Fight Night makes an ardent, hilarious, and moving addition.” —NPR
 
“Toews is a master of dialogue, and she swirls the adults’ perspectives through Swiv’s imperfect ventriloquism as if she were mixing paints.” —The New York Times

“Miriam Toews mines the same material over and over again in her novels. Thank goodness. Because those novels . . . all include her Canadian Mennonite background, her family’s struggles with mental illness, and her humor in the face of life’s slings and arrows. It’s material worthy of a life’s work, and not one of Toews’s books . . . is like another, neither in tone nor in structure nor in plot. . . . Miriam Toews will make you cheer and sob for all concerned in her richly imagined Fight Night.” —The Boston Globe

“Heart-wrenching and raw. . . . A triumph of devotion and imagination.” —The Guardian

“[Toews] can overlay the past on the present, make you laugh and cry, drop you off miles from where you started. . . . [A] quiet, unmistakeable intelligence. . . comes out in [her] humor.” —Ian Williams, Literary Hub

“An exuberant celebration of female resilience. . . . Toews has so carefully rendered the fierce love between these three stubborn, forceful women that the reader is willing to follow her to the tear-jerking finale. She has created a gem of a book, sharp edged and shining, a paean to the strength of women that posits humour and hope as a choice in the face of suffering.” —The Guardian    

“Miriam Toews’ Fight Night is a wonder, a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who never back down.” —BookPage

“Spectacular. . . . Toews haswritten a big-hearted, brisklypaced family saga about theextraordinary love that bindsthree generations of free-spiritedwomen together.” —USA Today

“A revelation.” —Richard Russo

"I read in one sitting, it was that good." —Sarah Polley

“[Fight Night] is a touching tribute to the matrilineal bond among three women of different generations. . . . Toews’ greatest talent lies in creating messy and lovable characters—the kind of people you’d want on your team (or coaching your team) if you were in a fight. Not because they are the strongest, but because somewhere inside themselves they’ve found the energy to keep moving forward.” —Los Angeles Times

"Miriam Toews [is] a master of the novel. Every book of hers is magic. This one's magic is terrifying, perhaps even more than others, but it's compelling and inescapable, demanding to be read." —New York Journal of Books
 “Fight Night is nearly all tenderness. . . . [T]here’s great pathos in watching a writer as gifted as Toews turn the same losses over and over as if looking for some way to redeem them on the page, knowing all the while that there isn’t. She admits as much in an observation lent to Swiv, who bristles against attempts by authority figures to domesticate her language: ‘It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.’” —Bookforum

“As a narrator, Swiv is charming and hilarious, her grandmother even more so. I laughed and cried reading this book; I can’t think of a higher endorsement.” —Tomi Obaro, BuzzFeed

“Fight Night is nearly all tenderness. . . . [T]here’s great pathos in watching a writer as gifted as Toews turn the same losses over and over as if looking for some way to redeem them on the page, knowing all the while that there isn’t. She admits as much in an observation lent to Swiv, who bristles against attempts by authority figures to domesticate her language: ‘It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.’” —Bookforum

“In Fight Night, as in her previous books, Miriam Toews is a genius. Her gigantic mind and heart are singular; her sentence-making powers extraordinary. Living in a time when Toews is writing is a reason to rejoice.” —R.O. Kwon, New York Times bestselling author of The Incendiaries

“Fight Night is a headlong rush of a novel narrated by a precocious nine-year-old girl who is doing everything she can to keep her troubled mother from falling apart and her irrepressible grandmother alive. Tender, heart-wrenching, darkly funny, and ultimately joyful, this novel pulses with life.” —Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The Exiles and Orphan Train

"Miriam Toews' compellingly crafted Fight Night is a testament to her astounding grasp of narrative voice. The emotional range exemplified on every page solidifies Toews as one of our most endearing, compassionate and prolific storytellers. Her young protagonist, nine-year-old Swiv, is expertly rendered with exacting grit and enviable humour. To read this examination of girlhood, family and mental wellness, is to become wholly enamoured with a cast of characters consistently demonstrating the power of exuberance and resiliency of love." —2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury (Zalika Reid-Benta, Megan Gail Coles, Joshua Whitehead, Tash Aw and Joshua Ferris)

"Miriam Toews does not disappoint with her latest outing. Fight Night is a novel well-conceived and executed with prose that is powerful and subtle in equal measure—the weight of a lightly crafted sentence will, after a second’s suspension, come back with a punch. We’re given a unique and quirky take on the world through the eyes of precocious nine-year-old Swiv. Swiv's observations, sometime hilarious, sometimes poignant, illustrate the lives of her mother and grandmother with a careful balance of wit, irony, dark humour, and philosophical musings. Fight Night is a thoughtful and thoroughly enjoyable read about women and girls navigating the world together." —2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Rebecca Fisseha, Michelle Good, and Steven Price) Expand reviews