"Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness . Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village-not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but a dull, oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This moving, darkly funny novel is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of her eccentric, touching family as it falls apart, each member on a collision course with the only community they have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer poised to take the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.

米裏婭姆·托尤斯（1964—）生於加拿大馬尼托巴省斯坦巴赫小鎮的一個門諾教傢庭，曾獲得電影學學士學位和新聞學學士學位，現為加拿大廣播公司自由撰稿人。她的第一部小說《幸運的夏日》（1996）獲兩項大奬，第二部小說《教養不錯的孩子》（1998）獲麥剋納利·羅賓遜年度圖書奬。《復雜的善意》為其第三部小說，2004年版後立刻好評如潮，贏得來自大洋彼岸英國的高度贊譽，《渥太華公民》雜誌稱它是“當前的一部絕妙小說”。