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Miriam Toews's new novel, Irma Voth, and her memoir, Swing Low, have both just been published in the USA. They are reviewed together in today's Sunday New York Times Book Review.

Irma Voth is based, in part, on Toews's experience acting in the 2007 film Silent Light directed by Carlos Reygadas, et in an Old Colony Mennonite Village. However, the character's family life is nothing like Toews's own.

Toews reveals aspects of her own life in her memoir, Swing Low, which focuses on the mental illness and suicide of her father, Mel Toews. Readers of Toews's fiction especially will find this book compelling, as it uses fictional techniques to reveal what her father might have been thinking in his last months.

Either separately or together, these books would be wonderful texts for discussing in a book group.

AEH