A Boy of Good Breeding

By: Miriam Toews

Narrated by: Susanna Fournier

From the acclaimed Giller Prize Finalist and Governor General’s Award Winner: a delightfully funny and charming second novel about Canada’s smallest town.

Life in Winnipeg didn’ t go as planned for Knute and her daughter. But living back in Algren with her parents and working for the longtime mayor, Hosea Funk, has its own challenges: Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea’s attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister—even if that means keeping the town’s population at an even 1500. Bringing to life small-town Canada and all its larger-than-life characters, A Boy of Good Breeding is a big-hearted, hilarious novel about finding out where you belong.

Critic reviews

“A Boy of Good Breeding caught me at the throat, made me laugh and weep with sad-sweet joy. . . . [The characters] get under your skin, and finally, it seems, into your very blood, where they quicken the heart. . . . Tonic for the spirit: a charming, deeply moving, unerringly human story, perfectly shaped and beautifully told.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Reading [Toews ] is like climbing into a fizzy bath of lunatic humour. . . . Buried in the mysteries of parenthood, love and death are at least a couple of home truths.”
—Toronto Star

“This is a lovely book; each character is a real person, fully realized. . . . But you’ll have to read A Boy of Good Breeding for yourself, to be moved by the story’s unfolding to a resolution that promises much; Toews has given us a novel that lets us write her characters’ futures.”
—Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal

“A Boy of Good Breeding is a novel that balances joy, sorrow and hopeless dreams and is impossible to put down.”
—Yukon