“Well,” says Irma Voth, the young woman who gives her name to Miriam Toews’s new novel, “sometimes the only way I know I’m alive is when I feel the pain in my chest.” It’s a familiar sentiment in Toews’s fiction, which, at its best, offers a crystalline vision of the pain implicit in the very notion of family, of the inevitable loss that accompanies loving another person. And Irma Voth is unmistakably Toews at her best, an understated yet overwhelmingly moving book of grace and wisdom. It’s also a welcome change after Toews’s previous novel, 2008’s The Flying Troutmans, which withered under the weight of its own quirkiness. Part of the reason Irma Voth succeeds where Troutmans failed comes from Toews’s return to the fertile narrative territory of the Mennonite communities she so heartbreakingly explored in A Complicated Kindness. But beyond that common ground, Voth is simply a more stark, beautiful, and mature work, one entirely comfortable within itself, its scope, and its sadness.

As the action commences, Irma Voth, a young Canadian Mennonite whose family has relocated to Mexico, is drawn into the production of a film about Mexican Mennonites — it must be mentioned, I suppose, that Toews here draws on her own experience starring in Carlos Reygadas’s 2007 film, Stellet Licht — just as her own life is thrown into turmoil by the departure of her husband, Jorge. Irma eventually becomes responsible for her two younger sisters. When the Voth girls relocate to Mexico City, they must learn to live as people apart from the cloistered reality in which they were raised, a process further complicated by the revelation of a family secret that forever changes the way Irma understands her relationship to the world.

Put like that, the novel’s broad strokes sound almost silly. But it is a testament to Toews’s gifts of storytelling and characterization that she can take a narrative with such familiar contours into a place of newness and clarity. Tropes that would be laughable clichés in the hands of lesser writers — the painful family betrayal revealed, for instance — here transform into moments of remarkable, chilling power. In Mexico City, one of Irma’s friends suggests that maybe “every trauma presents a choice: paralysis or the psychic energy to move forward.” What’s remarkable about Irma Voth is that it posits for the reader a world in which both options coexist: a nuanced place where we can stall in the difficulty and sadness of a moment and then burst through, alongside these beautiful characters, to acceptance and grace.