A Complicated Kindness Novel by Miriam Toews

This hardcover novel explores the ties that bind families together and the forces that tear them apart. It's the story of Nomi Nickel, a heartbreakingly bewildered and wry young woman. She sets her path to righteousness and smothers her at the same time. This book was a Giller Prize finalist. The novel balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty teenage girl whose Canadian family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity (O, The Oprah Magazine). From the author of Women Talking--now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley "Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.