The book's confined setting and its tight timeframe combine to superb dramatic effect.” - Wall Street Journal The intelligence on display in Women Talking is as ferocious as it is warm.” - NPR.org a work of deep moral intelligence, a master class in ethics beautifully dressed as a novel. “Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest… She is an artist of escape she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves.” - The New Yorker Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews's brand of seditious wit” - The New York Times Toews' celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, Women Talking. “A feminist manifesto that delicately unwraps the horror, but also bubbles with the love and wry humor that has endeared Toews to her readers. 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?īased 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. 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. 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. One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. 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, Editors’ Choice “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

The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand.

St Joseph's University (Brooklyn Voices Series).

Miriam toews book list