Fight Night is told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv's absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assignment: to write a letter to "Gord," her unborn grandchild (and Swiv's soon-to-be brother or sister). "You're a small thing," Grandma writes to Gord, "and you must learn to fight."

As Swiv records her thoughts and observations, Fight Night unspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv's exasperating, wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel: someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way—painfully, joyously, ferociously — to love and fight to the end, on her own terms. (From Knopf Canada)

Fight Night was on the shortlist for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Scotiabank Giller Prize jury citation: "Miriam Toews' compellingly crafted Fight Night is a testament to her astounding grasp of narrative voice. The emotional range exemplified on every page solidifies Toews as one of our most endearing, compassionate and prolific storytellers. Her young protagonist, nine year old Swiv, is expertly rendered with exacting grit and enviable humour. To read this examination of girlhood, family and mental wellness, is to become wholly enamoured with a cast of characters consistently demonstrating the power of exuberance and resiliency of love."

Miriam Toews is the author of A Complicated Kindness, which received the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction in 2004 and won Canada Reads in 2006, championed by John K. Samson, and The Flying Troutmans. Her novel All My Puny Sorrows won the 2014 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2000, she wrote a memoir called Swing Low. Her 2018 novel, Women Talking, was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.

The fight is the fight to live, the fight for happiness, the fight for connection with human beings, the fight against loneliness, against alienation.

There are the other fights. We can fight authority and climate change and fascism and the Taliban. But in this case, the fight is to be able to go into your heart and to love and to experience joy, to spread joy. And that's not always easy.