All My Puny Sorrows

Yolanda is conflicted. Her sister Elf has battled depression for her whole adult life, and is in a psychiatric ward under permanent observation after attempting suicide - again. Yolanda has always looked up to Elf as her talented and beautiful older sister. She loves her with a fierce passion and wants to believe in the possibility of a future together, one in which Elf gets better. But it's looking unlikely and Yolanda has to decide; if the person you love is tired of living, is it kinder just to let them go? 'All my puny sorrows' (a line from a Coleridge poem) is written out of Miriam Toews' personal experience and is, in some ways, a grown-up version of 'A complicated kindness', the novel that catapulted Toews to her bestselling status in Canada.