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Elvira, Swiv’s ailing grandmother, discusses the virtues of ‘the assisted dying route’, having – we later learn – compassionately killed her father. Swiv, our nine-year-old protagonist, knows her grandfather and aunt killed themselves, and she fears her actress mother, Mooshie, might harbour an impulse to do the same. In Toews’s eighth novel, Fight Night, suicide and euthanasia are relegated to background themes. The question at its heart: if someone you love desperately wants to die, should you let them – and even help them? Toews wrestled with these traumas in her thorny, tragicomic breakout novel, All My Puny Sorrows (2014).

In 19 respectively, her father and older sister died by suicide. ‘Every protagonist is some version of me,’ she said in a recent interview, ‘and there’s always some version of my sister, some version of my mother.’ Toews, who grew up in a conservative Mennonite community, published her first novel in 1996 at the age of thirty-one. The Canadian novelist Miriam Toews is open about her fiction’s autobiographical basis.