The internationally bestselling novel based on real events—published in 2018 by Miriam Toews, the award-winning author of All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.
Named Best Book of The Year by The New York Times.
Now a major motion picture, adapted and directed by Sarah Polley.
For several years, girls and women in the remote Mennonite colony of Molotschna have reported assaults in the night by what some in the community claim are ghosts or demons. Others blame “wild female imagination”—until several of the men behind the attacks are discovered and apprehended. While the men of the colony go into town to bail out the accused, the women meet secretly in a hayloft to determine how to respond. They have just two days to decide what to do before the men return. Acerbic, funny, tender and wise, acclaimed author Miriam Toews’s spellbinding seventh novel contains a universe of revelatory thinking about gender, justice, freedom and power.
REVIEWS
... 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 ... The New York Times Book Review
the novel ends on a note of terrifying hope so pure and desperate and idealistic that it’s almost unbearable. The humility of the novel’s title belies the extraordinary ambition of its characters, who, reeling from trauma, sit, talk, and chart out a future within two days. The New York Review of Books.
It must have taken guts to write this novel… The improbable, almost magical result creates something redemptive from a subject that seems anything but. The Guardian