Fight NightFight Night

The beloved author of bestsellers Women Talking, A Complicated Kindness, and All My Puny Sorrows returns with a funny, smart, headlong rush of a novel full of wit, flawless writing, and a tribute to the power of both pain and love through three generations in an unusual family. Fight Night is told in the unforgettable and instantly classic voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, an actor who is raising Swiv while taking care of her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother, Elvira. When Swiv is temporarily kicked out of school, her Grandma becomes her teacher, and gives her an assignment: to write a letter to Swiv's absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives an assignment to Grandma: to write a letter to "Gord," her unborn grandchild (and Swiv's soon-to-be brother or sister). "You are a small thing," Grandma writes to Gord, "but you must learn to fight." Through the astonishing, headlong rush of Swiv's voice as she records her thoughts and observations, Fight Night unspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to fight across three generations of women in a close-knit family. It is also a poignant love letter to the wise, exasperating, and irrepresible woman at the heart of the family, Swiv's Grandma: someone who knows acutely what it costs to live in this world, yet has found a way--painfully, ferociously--to love and fight to the end, on her own terms.