The conversation turned out to be this: Christine Fellows would sing, then Miriam Toews would read. The store was PACKED.Ĭhristine Fellows hosted the evening, “in conversation” with Miriam Toews. We went to the Winnipeg book launch of Women Talking on August 23rd at McNally Robinson Grant Park…Īnd we weren’t the only ones. Those men don’t want their actions to be known. The fact that this has happened (and may still be happening today) needs to be known. (Before the novel begins, Toews includes a note stating that in 2013, there had been more reports of these attacks continuing within the colony.) But this book shines a very glaring light directly onto those events…and I think that’s very important. I don’t know that things have gotten any better on the colony where these events occurred. This novel is heart-wrenching, infuriating, and beautiful. They talk, they share, they argue, they listen to one another.

In this novel, the women realistically weigh their options: stay and fight, leave, or do nothing. But Toews’ writing is nuanced, complicated, there are many factors to consider. And so, to be honest, I was wishing for a revenge novel of the most violent sort. Between 20, a group of men on the colony had been using an animal anesthetic to knock females unconscious and rape them. Miriam Toews truly has a gift for representing love and anger, humour and devastation, in a compelling narrative.įor those that perhaps don’t know or haven’t heard, Women Talking is a response to, or an imagined interaction with, actual events that occurred in an isolated Mennonite Colony in Bolivia. Women Talking was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Trillium Book Award.Have you read Women Talking yet? I finished reading it the other day, I couldn’t put it down. And like a vast night sky coming into view behind the bright sparks of their voices, we learn of the devastating events that have led to this moment. ( From Knopf Canada) Gradually, as we hear the women's vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have 48 hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony. Thus begins Miriam Toews's spellbinding novel.

This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation. Eight women - ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers yet to August, each one extraordinary - will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day's true task will begin. He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009.

Women Talking by Miriam Toews