Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

National Bestseller
Winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Reading Women Award

This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale. --Margaret Atwood, on Twitter

Scorching . . . Women Talking is a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness. --New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the minutes of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Named a Best Book of the Year By
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOK REVIEW (Notable Books of the Year) * NPR.ORG* THE WASHINGTON POST * REAL SIMPLE * THE NEW YORK TIMES (PARUL SEHGAL'S TOP BOKS OF THE YEAR) * SLATE * STAR TRIBUNE (MINEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL) * LITHUB * AUSTIN CHRONICLE * GOP* ELECTRIC LITERATURE * KIRKUS REVIEWS * JEZEBEL* BUSTLE * PUBLISHERS WEKLY * TIME* LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE AV CLUB * MASHABLE * VOX *

Miriam Toews was born in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published five novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards in Canada, including the Governor General's Literary Award (for A Complicated Kindness) and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (for The Flying Troutmans). In 2010 she received the prestigious Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Irma Voth is Toews's most recent novel. She lives in Toronto.