Excerpt from A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Her son, also old in my mind—I was twenty-one—lived alone in the apartment next to mine. He was a physics professor at the university. I would open my door and take the woman's hand and lead her to her son's door and knock and wait for him to open his door. He never bothered opening his tiny door with the latch to see who was there. He knew who was there. Here's your mom, I'd say. Peter would apologize, and I'd wave it away, and Peter would take his mother's hand and slowly walk her back down the dim corridor to her own apartment. Pater, Pater, Mama, Mama, the two would murmur, the old woman calm now and slumped against her old son's body.

One morning—it was late in the fall, after an appointment with my obstetrician—I came home to find police in the hallway outside my apartment. The door to Peter's apartment was open. The police held their hands over their faces when they spoke to me. Peter had electrocuted himself in the bathtub. I ran to my apartment and opened all the windows. I threw up in the kitchen sink. I went back into the hallway and said to the police, But what about his mother? She lives in the apartment down the hall. The police said they had taken her away.

I did not ask, but often wondered, which of these cataclysmic events happened first: Peter's death or his mother's removal?

* * *

These days, my two youngest grandchildren have a habit of biting their mothers, and in some instances, other children. My daughter and my daughter-in-law texted me photos of the bite marks, some taken by themselves and some by concerned daycare workers. My daughters are worried about the biting, but also worried because babies who bite are not allowed to attend daycare. And if that were to happen, my daughters would lose their fucking minds.

When I saw the photos, I texted back that it was good to know my grandkids were biting other kids, not themselves. I've received no response.

* * *

My six-year-old granddaughter characterizes my writing process this way: She has two pairs of glasses. One for downstairs. One for upstairs. She mixes them up. She can't wear the downstairs glasses upstairs, or the upstairs glasses downstairs. She pretends to light a candle and puts it beside her coffee cup and then she stares straight ahead at her computer and reaches for her candle. She mimes drinking it, and screams.

Today I looked at pictures on the internet of bodies after being hit by trains. But what I'm really trying to do is research winds for my Wind Museum. I tell myself, Just think about wind. Stick with the wind.

The Saffir‒Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (SSHWS) classifies hurricanes—western hemisphere tropical cyclones that exceed the intensities of tropical depressions and tropical storms—into five categories, distinguished by the intensities of their sustained winds.

Now we're getting somewhere.

The skunk with distemper is stuck in the window well again, chewing incessantly on the garden hose that is coiled up in there.

Through my window, across my tiny yard, I can see my four-year-old grandson in my mother's bedroom as he tumbles and jumps and spins. I'm listening to "Le Tango de Chez Nous," and his movement appears choreographed, so beautiful and poetic and playful. My mother is lying in her bed, clapping.

Last night I put this same grandson to bed. I lay down with him in his narrow bed and we talked for a while in the dark, with his head on my shoulder. We held hands. Grandma, he said. Yeah? I said. How old are you? Fifty-eight, I said.

And then you'll be sixty, he said. And then you'll be seventy. And then you'll be eighty. And then you'll be ninety. And then you'll be one hundred. And then you'll be murdered.

What! I said.

I mean and then you'll be dead, he said.

Excerpted from A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. Copyright © 2025 by Miriam Toews. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.