Summer of My Amazing Luck

'Toews's debut is a tart, affectionate look at welfare mothers...Toews is especially good on the 'rollicking, happy, impoverished family' of the projects [and] scathing about the humiliations of poverty.' New York Times Lucy and her eight-month-old son live in a Winnipeg housing project filled with single mothers on the dole. Still dealing with her own mother's sudden death, and new to the ever-multiplying complications of life on welfare, Lucy strikes up a friendship with her neighbour, Lish. On the whole, they're pretty happy . . . But Lucy wants to make sure they stay happy. And she has a plan. Told with Toews's signature scalding wit and deep compassion, Summer of my Amazing Luck is a brilliantly funny book about the intricacies of friendship, grief, and poverty. '[A] picaresque account of two welfare moms having loopy adventures and getting by in the city... The novel's voice [is] amused, warm, curious, alive on the page.' The New Yorker

Miriam Toews is the author of seven bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness,The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, All My Puny Sorrows and Women Talking and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/ Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.