Published in 2025
336 pages
Georgia Elvira Toews (1990) is a Canadian novelist based in Toronto.
Toews’ debut novel, Hey, Good Luck Out There (2022), humorously recounts the author’s struggle with addiction, recovery and apartment-hunting during her late teens and early twenties. In her second novel, Nobody Asked for This (2025), Toews examines her young adulthood and tests the limits of humor itself through the lens of a wryly observant stand-up comedian named Virginia Woolard.
Toews is frequently depicted in novels by her mother, author Miriam Toews, including as the teenage character Nora Von Riesen, whose “archly lacerating exchanges” with her mother permeate All My Puny Sorrows (2014, adapted for film in 2021).
What is this book about?
A razor-sharp dramedy following a twenty-something female comic as she navigates family grief, a dysfunctional friendship, and a date gone very wrong, from Georgia Toews, author of Hey, Good Luck Out There.
Virginia is twenty-three and a stand-up comedian. In between working the rounds of Toronto’s small comedy club circuit and auditioning for paper towel commercials, she is tiptoeing around her depressed roommate and childhood friend, Haley, and having biweekly dinners with her bereaved stepdad, Dale, while trying to manage her own grief at the loss of her mother. She is also secretly working to get the green card that will be her ticket to L.A. and, she hopes, a glittering comedy career.
But when Dale tells her that he wants to sell their family home, and when a date with a fellow comic turns into a shattering encounter, she is forced to confront the limits of comedy—and friendship. Not every experience can be neatly packaged into a “bit,” and not every friendship is meant to last.
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Nobody Asked for This reaches into the messy depths of love, friendship, grief and trauma and, like all the best jokes, is utterly unpredictable.
