AComplicated Kindness by Miriam Toews is one of the all-time great Canadian novels. It spent over a year on bestseller lists in Canada and won a host of prizes, including a Governor General’s Award. It’s almost two decades old now, but it still reads as tender and jarring as ever. It’s told from the perspective of a scrappy-but-wounded teenager dealing with the same angst everyone goes through at that age—plus the added challenge of missing her mother and older sister, who have absconded from their tiny Mennonite community.
This is how the novel renders dialogue:
