A Boy of Good Breeding: A Novel

By Miriam Toews

A single mom returns to her hometown in Manitoba and gets tangled up in the mayor’s scheme to meet the Canadian Prime Minister . . .

A big-hearted, hilarious novel of small-town Canada and its larger-than-life characters—including one stubborn, stray dog—from the author of Women Talking

Life in Winnipeg didn’t go as planned for Knute McCloud and her daughter. She’s moved back to Algren to help her mom look after her dad after his heart attack, and gets a job working for the longtime mayor and her dad’s best friend, Hosea Funk. Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea’s attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister, who Hosea believes is his long-lost father after a secret deathbed confession from his mother.

In order to be designated Canada’s smallest town and get an official visit from that very same Prime Minister, they have to keep the town’s population to 1,500—no more, no less. Problem is, people keep coming and going, having triplets, or getting married, or dying. Hosea’s longtime girlfriend wants to move in, and then Knute’s ex shows up—it’s causing no end of trouble.

A delightfully quirky novel about the eccentricities of small-town life, and finally finding out where you truly belong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781640091870

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews for A Boy of Good Breeding

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not her best work, I reckon. All Toews' stories seem to be about quirky and strange people and situations, but this one is just too far out in left field for me. Very little is 'believable' and although that doesn't invalidate the story, it makes it less interesting for me. Even the characters names (especially the characters names) are off the planet. However all of the basic plots stretch credibility.

[wvlibrarydude · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good small town book with characters that will bring laughs along the way. Hosea is the mayor who wants to meet his father (the prime minister) on a visit to the smallest town in Canada. So he keeps a little scribbler of movers, births, deaths, divorces and so forth. He is constantly fixated on the 1,500 that will barely allow him to be a town. While the characters and situations were good, I was a little tired of all of the cussing throughout the book (listened to audiobook version). The only cussing that really brough rich flavor was that of Uncle Jack. One snippet of a short visit with Tom, but I was left wanting so much more from him. I laughed sooooo hard during his monologue.

[juliechabon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A tender , loving story about some people in a small , the smallest?, town in Canada. Fortune plays with them and upsets the dreams of the lonely, bewildered mayor. Well defined characters and hilarious coincidences come in a great small package.

[tarendz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book deals with the obsessed mayor of the smallest town in Canada, his assistant and his assistant's family. Mayor Hosea Funk is desperate to have exactly 1,500 inhabitants in his town, since this is the limit to be called a town, and he doesn't want one person extra, because then he wouldn't be the smallest town in Canada anymore. His struggles to either reach or maintain this particular number are of course absurd, but never feel surreal since Toews manages to portray Hosea as a very human and understandable character. (This skill reminds me of John Irving or Roald Dahl: it's only when you try to retell their stories to someone else, that you feel amazed by the absurdity of a hotel for dwarfs or a murder by means of a lamb steak.)All in all, a very amusing and pleasant read. I don't give it five stars because it feels as if there's some distance between the reader and the main characters.