"A ferociously powerful book. Your jaw will fall open, your stomach will drop and then you will marvel at the remarkable will Toews has put in the hearts of the women in her book. As timely as it is timeless. A stunning achievement, and a testament to the defiant and fearless choices women have made, and will continue to make, in order to speak, think and exist without the fear of patriarchal control. Women Talking must be heralded as one of the most important books about the fight for bodily autonomy since the Handmaid's Tale. Vital and extraordinary."
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date 2020-03-03
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Archived Staff Suggestions / Hannah W. / Lauren A.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781635574340
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 BOOK REVIEW (Notable Books of the Year) * NPR.ORG* THE WASHINGTON POST * REAL SIMPLE * THE NEW YORK TIMES (PARUL SEHGAL'S TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR) * SLATE * STAR TRIBUNE (MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL) * LITHUB * ELECTRIC LITERATURE * KIRKUS REVIEWS * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * TIME.COM * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE AV CLUB * VOX
