After charming Canadian readers and reviewers with her latest novel, A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews is starting to get some international attention. In Britain’s The Guardian, Zoe Williams has turned in a long profile of Toews, including a brief history of the Mennonite sect and a visit to Toews’ hometown of Winnipeg. “It’s a city of bafflingly broad streets and meticulous town planning,” writes Williams of the ‘Peg. “It used to be called the Chicago of the north, though isn’t any more; it seems faded and contradictory. Most of the time, it feels like a warm, leftie, Bohemian utopia (that’s a figurative ‘warm’; it’s bloody freezing most of the year).”

Related links:
Miriam Toews profile in the Guardian