ALL MY PUNY SORROWS

San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2014. First edition. hardcover. Fine copy in a fine jacket with a fine pamphlet laid in housed in a fine slipcase. Signed by Toews on the title page, her sixth novel. Includes the booklet with the same title, and all housed in a black cloth slipcase. One of Powell's IndieSpensable editions. Toews, a Canadian writer, won the 2014 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for this book, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2015 Folio Prize for Literature, and the 2015 Wellcome Book Prize. The novel recounts the (truncated) tumultuous relationship of the Von Riesen sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi, the only children of an intellectual, free-spirited family from a conservative Mennonite community. Yolandi, the novel's narrator, has always lived in her sister's shadow; whereas Elfrieda is a gifted, beautiful, happily marrried, and much celebrated concert pianist, Yolandi is something of a failure, with a floundering writing career and teenage children from separate fathers. Yet it is Elfrieda who suffers from acute depression and a desire to die, much like her father before her, who killed himself by stepping in front of a train. Yolandi makes it her mission to save her sister, even as Elf begs her to accompany her to a Swiss clinic and enable her death. (Inventory #: 14935)