Coming of age story of a girl left behind in the dark

By Miriam Toews

Vintage, €11.95

The Canadian author Miriam Toews has a gift for blending the humorous with the melancholic in her richly rewarding autobiographical fiction.

Raised in a Mennonite community in Canada, Toews got out as soon as she graduated from high school. In A Complicated Kindness, her newly-republished third novel, she draws on this experience in a coming-of-age story that is by turns sardonic, lonely and transfixing.

The book is the ...