Casey Plett will never stop recommending this 2004 novel by Miriam Toews
This interview originally aired on Feb. 1, 2020.
Casey Plett is a Manitoba-born and Ontario-based author. In 2019, Plett's debut novel Little Fish won the Firecracker Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, a $60,000 prize that goes to the year's best debut novel in Canada.
A book that Plett loves reading over and over again is A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. The 2004 novel won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, was a finalist for the Giller Prize and won Canada Reads in 2006, when it was championed by John K. Samson.
"A book that I go back to all the time is the novel A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It's a book about a Mennonite teenager in the early 1980s whose family is falling apart. She has troubles with the church and the pastor in the town who's also her uncle.
I can scarcely think of another book that I want to push on people.
"This book ends in such the most heartbreaking, beautiful and hopeful way that I read it over and over again. I cry every time. I can scarcely think of another book that I want to push on people."
Casey Plett's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
