Miriam Toews - Irma Voth

And one day I would be a beggar and the sun would be shining and I would be so happy, and I wouldn’t ever want to know why. And then Mamma would come and hug me — what nice imaginings these are!

And then I parked the car and walked towards my old house. The curtains were closed and it was late in the day, stars were everywhere, and I could hear the incomprehensible noises of different animals attempting to communicate with each other in the dark and the voices of my brothers and my parents singing some old ancient song in Low German and I stood outside the door for a while and listened before I went inside to say hello, how are you?

For their tremendous efforts in the making of this book I’d like to thank Sarah Chalfant, Michael Schellenberg, Hannah Griffiths, Louise Dennys, Marion Garner, Kelly Hill, Deirdre Molina, José Molina and Nicola Makoway.

On this page I quoted from a beautifully written obituary sent to me in a letter from a friend. I know that it ran in the Globe and Mail newspaper but regret that I have no idea when and do not know who was being so well celebrated.

Many thanks to Neal Rempel for kindly giving me permission to use some of the details of his play The Last Words of Duct Schultz for my own purposes in the book, beginning on this page.

MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of four previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; A Complicated Kindness (winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction) and The Flying Troutmans (winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life . She lives in Toronto.