Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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.

"If Toews clarifies the smallness of the world these women inhabit, their radicalism sometimes far exceeds our own... But the novel ends on a note of terrifying hope so pure and desperate and idealistic that it’s almost unbearable."  -  Lili Loofbourow, The New York Times Book Review

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?

"...though Toews' writing is simple and often funny, her ideas are difficult in the extreme... Toews' emphasis on names and definitions serves to highlight how precise her own writing is, and how smart. The intelligence on display in Women Talking is as ferocious as it is warm. Women Talking is a profoundly intelligent book. It is an indictment of authority and a defence of belief."  -  Lily Meyer, NPR

Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Miriam Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humour to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.