The Flying Troutmans - by Miriam Toews (Paperback)

About the Book

"Meet the Troutmans. When Hattie's moody boyfriend dumps her in Paris, she returns home to find that her sister Min is in the psych ward again. Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, are fending for themselves by focusing on other things--Logan is infatuated with acerbic New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon, for example, while Thebes has dyed her hair purple and is refining her hip-hop vernacular. Freaked out by the prospect of becoming a surrogate mother to these two kids, Hattie decides to take them in the family van to find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art gallery in South Dakota. What ensues is a remarkable journey across America, as aunt and kids--through chaos as diverse as their personalities--discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought" --

Book Synopsis

"This saga of bad luck and good company is a wry, scary, heartfelt ode to the traverses we have to make in life when we're at the end of our rope and there's no net below us." --ELLE

From the author of Women Talking--now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley

When Hattie's moody boyfriend dumps her in Paris, she returns home to find that her sister Min is in the psych ward again. Freaked out by the prospect of becoming a surrogate mother to Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, Hattie decides to take them in the family van to find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art gallery in South Dakota. What ensues is a remarkable journey across America, as aunt and kids--through chaos as diverse as their personalities--discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.

Review Quotes

"This saga of bad luck and good company is a wry, scary, heartfelt ode to the traverses we have to make in life when we're at the end of our rope and there's no net below us." --Elle

"A lovably nutty cast." --Publishers Weekly

"Not since Stephen Leacock have our neighbors to the north given us a writer as witty and wise as Miriam Toews . . . She is out to entertain with words, and the tale of the flying Troutmans is her best entertainment yet." --Los Angeles Times

"Toews excels here at comedic sophistication, all while masterfully embedding explorations of madness, truth, and the immense sorrow that comes from caring for someone who is derailed by mania's devious tug." --Booklist

"Miriam Toews saunters along the line between comedy and grief as if she might lose her balance at any moment. But she never does. The precarious tone of her novels about fractured families is the crafted effect of a nimble writer . . . Toews is a genius at recording the everyday weirdness of young people, their capricious vacillation between screw-you sarcasm and tender pleading for affirmation." --Washington Post

"Engaging, humorous, grim, and redemptive, this is essential reading." --Library Journal

About the Author

Miriam Toews is the author of A Complicated Kindness, winner of the Governor General's Award and finalist for the Giller Prize, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Swing Low: A Life. She has written for "This American Life," and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.