Women Talking

Miriam Toews, Matthew Edison

eAudio - 2019

A transformative and necessary work—as completely unexpected as it is inspired—by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness. Based on actual events that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community where more than 100 girls and women were drugged unconscious and assaulted in the night by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were "ghosts" or "demons," Miriam Toews' bold and affecting novel Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. The novel takes place over forty-eight hours, as eight women gather in secret in a neighbour's barn while the men are in a nearby town posting bail for the attackers. They have com...e together to debate, on behalf of all the women and children in the community, whether to stay or leave before the men return. Taking minutes is the one man trusted and invited by the women to witness the conversation—a former outcast whose own surprising story is revealed as... more