A Complicated Kindness

What’s a teenaged rebel to do in a smug Mennonite community? If you’re 16-year-old Nomi Nickel — drive aimlessly around the countryside with your pot-smoking boyfriend. Rage against fate and a runaway mother for deserting you in the wrong “East Village.” And put off finishing that English assignment as long as your oddly attentive teacher will let you. Wise, edgy, and wickedly funny, Nomi has wooed thousands of readers with her bittersweet tale of adolescent angst — Mennonite-style — since A Complicated Kindness began climbing North American bestseller lists, appeared in People and O Magazine, and won Canada’s 2004 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. In her droll, refreshing voice, Nomi tells the story of her eccentric, touching family as it falls apart, each member on a collision course with the only community they have ever known.

"Brilliantly narrated by Cara Pifko, flawless production values, and a strongly recommended addition to community library audiobook collections." - Midwest Book Review

"The mood and narrative are haunting and howlingly funny with black humour thanks in part to TV actor Cara Pifko. Her reading, which captures every ounce of adolescent angst Miriam Toews put into her rebellious Mennonite teenaged heroine, is spirited and compellingly listenable." - Ottawa Citizen

"Toews's novel, about the coming of age of 16-year-old Nomi Nickel in the Mennonite community of East Village, Manitoba, deservedly won the Governor-General's Award for fiction. The story of Nomi's life with her feckless father - her sister and her mother have long disappeared - and her fundamentalist neighbours and relatives is edgy, funny and moving, and Cara Pifko's reading is perfectly delicious." - Globe and Mail