Women Talking: The Oscar-winning film starring Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy

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'Don't miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.' - Margaret Atwood

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks - waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why - their stories were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.'

Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home.

How should we live How should we love How should we treat one another How should we organise our societies These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another - and Miriam Toews makes them the questions we must all ask ourselves.

Reviews

'Don't miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.' - Margaret Atwood

'Women Talking is an astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I've read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come.' - Lauren Groff

Author Bio

Miriam Toews (pronounced taves) was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She has published four novels and a memoir of her father, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Governor General's Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award (twice), and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2007 she made her screen debut in the film Luz silenciosa. She was nominated for Best Actress at Mexico's Ariel Awards for her performance.