Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

Don't miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood, Twitter

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks-waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why-their stories were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.'

Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home.

How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another-and Miriam Toews makes them the questions we must all ask ourselves.

• ISBN10: 0571340326
• ISBN13: 9780571340323
• Publish Date: 30 August 2018 (first published 21 August 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 28 January 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Faber & Faber
• Edition: Main
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

[Beth C.]

I'm...not sure how I feel about this novel. I found it interesting that these women, having been brutalized by the men of their colony, are telling their stories...through the eyes of a man. A man who has his own secrets, and was kicked out of the colony...who is barely a man in the eyes of those within...but a man nonetheless. It was almost as if the author was saying that no matter what happens, those women will never truly be able to escape? There's certainly food for thought here, not only about religion and dogma, or about the beliefs that isolate us or entrap us or center us, but about the values we place on ourselves and our loved ones. About what it takes to stand up for oneself, in a place where that has never before been allowed. And about what it means to stand up for oneself - to fight, to flee...or even to ignore.