Puny sorrows. There’s a tension to the pairing, a wink, a jumbo shrimp-ness. It’s an atom and an abyss, shriveled and gigantic, an almost-oxymoron that feels both comical and tragic, depending on how you read it. Indeed, Miriam Toews’ excellent novel, about one sister hellbent on committing suicide and another sister hellbent on keeping her alive – “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other” – feels like a celebration of antipodes. It’s rare to find a book that regards both life and death with real reverence, but Toews accomplishes this balancing act with an effortless grace.

The novel’s three main characters are gutsy, complicated women who have been strong-armed into a relentless resilience: Elf, a world-renowned concert pianist who, “never developed a tolerance for the world,” Yoli, a nearly divorced novelist raising two teenagers on her own and attempting to ward off Elf’s self-destruction, and Lottie, their mother, a sturdy Mennonite who, despite having watched so many of her loved ones die, remains irrepressibly engaged in the pursuit of living. In many ways, Lottie emerges as the novel’s heart and soul, a woman whose Manitoban provinciality belies a fierce wisdom about survival.

We see Elf’s courage as a young girl, bucking the conventions of a religious community that refuses to acknowledge the power of its own women. We see Elf’s fragility as an adult, unable to bear the weight of existence itself. We see Yoli holding on to her husband and to her children and to Elf. We see Yoli letting go. And we see Lottie, half sage, half Winnie the Pooh, ever curious and slyly defiant.

From her sister’s hospital room, Yoli muses, “Everyone in the world was fighting with somebody to stay.” In many ways, this is a book about staying and leaving, about wildness and compliance, autonomy and community. It questions whether nonconformity is brave, selfish, hurtful, or all of those things at once. Whether an individual’s prerogative can be both self-affirming and catastrophic to the people around them. Whether we can hold those contradictions and manage to keep living. Leaving may be frightening but staying is terrifying for different reasons. What are we to do in the face of these flawed options? The magnitude too immense! The minutiae too microscopic!

It's strange that a book largely concerned with suicide manages to be so funny and hopeful. I think what I loved most about All My Puny Sorrows was its tenderness, even in the grimmest of moments. In my own life, a similar levity has helped me move through pain, and I found the novel to be a kind of balm, especially as the world melts and shouts and shakes around us.