How do you even begin to carve humour and light out of this kind of tragedy? In the book, after the death of her father, Yoli recalls, “He had seventy-seven dollars on him at the time and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this: You still have to eat.” For Toews, humour was always going to be an essential element of the story. Like their father, who had taken his own life almost exactly 12 years before, she threw herself under a train.

Her older sister, Marjorie, killed herself in 2010, having lived with severe depression for most of her life. Toews (it’s pronounced taves, to rhyme with saves) has been open about the fact that the book is largely autobiographical. As it becomes clear that Elf will achieve her wish at any cost, Yoli is forced to consider whether the most loving response would be to help her do so. As Yoli says, “she wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other”. It is the story of two sisters, Yolandi (Yoli), the chaotic middle-aged mother of two teenagers, and Elfrieda (Elf), a beautiful, talented, happily married concert pianist, who is nevertheless determined to kill herself. And if there were a prize for joyfulness in fiction, Toews would win hands down for the near-miraculous feat of transforming suicide and grief into a narrative packed with laugh-out-loud delights. Her book was also shortlisted for the Wellcome prize, which on Wednesday went to Marion Coutts’s account of her husband’s terminal illness, The Iceberg.īut while All My Puny Sorrows, which is very funny, may not be a natural award-winner – prizes generally require books to be serious and literary, as if the two things were one and the same – it has captured the hearts of critics and readers alike this year, bringing its Canadian author a new level of recognition in Britain.

Neither of us is really expecting it to win (“Believe me, I know,” she says, breezily), and sure enough, later that evening the prize goes to Akhil Sharma for his quietly devastating Family Life. I meet Miriam Toews as she is awaiting the announcement of the Folio prize, for which her novel All My Puny Sorrows has been shortlisted.

Miriam toews official website