Irma Voth

Miriam Toews, Miriam Toews

From Shelf: Five Leaves Bookshop sought recommendations for "novels that won't make you miserable"

Jorge said he wasn't coming back until I learned how to be a better wife . But before he drove off he gave me a new flashlight with triple C batteries and I'm grateful for it because this is a very dark, pitch-black part of the world .

Jorge said he wasn't coming back until I learned how to be a better wife . . . But before he drove off he gave me a new flashlight with triple C batteries and I'm grateful for it because this is a very dark, pitch-black part of the world . . . The closeted life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew arrives. They have come to make a movie about the strict Mennonite community in which she and her family live. Against her family's wishes, Irma takes a job on set and glimpses the wider world and a path towards something that feels like freedom.