The Flying Troutmans

De: Miriam Toews

Narrado por: Amy Rutherford

In this completely captivating book, Miriam Toews has created some of the most engaging characters in Canadian literature: Hattie, Logan and Thebes are bewildered, hopeful, angry, and most of all, absolutely alive. Full of richly skewed, richly funny detail, The Flying Troutmans is a uniquely affecting novel.

Days after being dumped by her boyfriend Marc in Paris – "he was heading off to an ashram and said we could communicate telepathically" – Hattie hears her sister Min has been checked into a psychiatric hospital, and finds herself flying back to Winnipeg to take care of Thebes and Logan, her niece and nephew. Not knowing what else to do, she loads the kids, a cooler, and a pile of CDs into their van and they set out on a road trip in search of the children's long-lost father, Cherkis.

In part because no one has any good idea where Cherkis is, the traveling matters more than the destination. On their wayward, eventful journey down to North Dakota and beyond, the Troutmans stay at scary motels, meet helpful hippies, and try to ignore the threatening noises coming from under the hood of their van. Eleven-year-old Thebes spends her time making huge novelty cheques with arts and crafts supplies in the back, and won't wash, no matter how wild and matted her purple hair gets; she forgot to pack any clothes. Four years older, Logan carves phrases like "Fear Yourself" into the dashboard, and repeatedly disappears in the middle of the night to play basketball; he's in love, he says, with New York Times columnist Deborah Solomon. Meanwhile, Min can't be reached at the hospital, and, more than once, Hattie calls Marc in tears.

But though it might seem like an escape from crisis into chaos, this journey is also desperately necessary, a chance for an accidental family to accept, understand or at least find their way through overwhelming times. From interwoven memories and scenes from the past, we learn much more about them: how Min got so sick, why Cherkis left home, why Hattie went to Paris, and what made Thebes and Logan who they are today.

Reseñas de la Crítica

#1 National Bestseller
Winner of the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
A Globe and Mail Best Book
Longlisted for the Orange Prize (Women's Prize) for Fiction

"Every detail of Toews's young heroes' behaviour rings startlingly true and the dialogue is pitch perfect. The premise of the book is sad, yet its execution is filled to the brim with hilarity and joy. Toews captures the rawness of teenagers' personalities—their fledgling attempts at brilliance, their hysterical naiveté and their troubled longings. Toews's book is a love song to young people trying to navigate the volcanic world of adult emotions."
—Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize jury

“Toews’s writing is a unique collision of sadness and humour. . . . The Flying Troutmans is a dark story but it is also a never-ending series of hilarious adventures.”
—Ottawa Citizen

"Spark, specificity and rueful wit."
—The New York Times Book Review

“Engaging, humorous, grim, and redemptive, this is essential reading.”
—Library Journal

“It’s darkly funny, bursting at the seams with quirky characters and off-kilter pop culture references that rival Douglas Coupland’s for their incisive wit.”
—The Vancouver Sun

“Toews may have invented a new genre, the romantic-depressive comedy, at which she excels.”
—Toronto Star

“Toews has a terrific ability to capture the mix of irony and innocence in a smart child’s mind. . . . She balances heartbreak with laugh-out-loud wit.”
—Edmonton Journal

“Toews writes . . . in a high-energy original voice filled with love, fear, humour and originality. . . . Miriam Toews is an extraordinarily gifted writer, one who writes with unsentimental compassion for her people and an honest understanding of their past, the tectonic shifts of their present and variables of their future.”
—The Globe and Mail


“Miriam Toews saunters along the line between comedy and grief as if she might lose her balance at any moment. But she never does. The precarious tone of her novels about fractured families is the crafted effect of a nimble writer. . . . Deadpan irony and hip cultural references
abound.”
—The Washington Post

"An odd and compelling story about family ties and what happens when they unravel . . . Lest you should think the story is totally depressing, let me say that it’s not. It’s actually very humorous and touching, in its own peculiar way. Toews’s fearless writing style and offbeat imagination are wonderful. Don’t miss this one.”
—MetroValley Newspaper Group

“Not since Stephen Leacock have our neighbours to the north given us a writer as witty and wise as Miriam Toews.”
—Los Angeles Times

Great characters!

LOL funny, adventurous, and an enjoyable ride with this wacky crew. Thebes will be a superwoman when she reaches adulthood.