Little Woman

Miriam Toews’s eighth novel, Fight Night, takes the form of a long letter penned by nine-year-old Swiv to her absent father — whose whereabouts and motivations for leaving are, at least to her, mysterious. Swiv has been expelled for fighting and now spends her days in the school of life presided over by her grandmother, a frail though free-spirited iconoclast. Her mother, an actor, is frequently busy with rehearsals. Swiv is often embarrassed by her grandma’s eccentric behaviour, with a texture of aggravation specific to children on the brink of growing up. “I don’t understand adults,” she fumes. “I hate them.” Underneath the preadolescent veneer, though, is the deep love that binds these three generations.

Men are usually background figures in Toews’s books, although their abuses loom large. Some of her best-known works deal with the violence and trauma perpetrated by patriarchal Mennonite societies. A Complicated Kindness, which won a 2004 Governor...