Women Talking
SynopsisPlot
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?
Story
About this book
In a remote Mennonite colony, women and girls have for two years been drugged and assaulted at night by men from their own community. The attacks were first blamed on demons sent as punishment for sin. When the truth becomes known, eight women gather secretly in a hayloft while the colony's men are away in the city raising bail for the accused.
The novel is presented as the minutes of that single long meeting, recorded by a male schoolteacher, the only man in the loft. The women are illiterate and cannot speak the national language of the country where they live. Their debate moves through faith, forgiveness, motherhood, safety, and the right to decide for themselves. Miriam Toews grew up in a Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada.
Toews based the story on real events in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, where assaults of this kind were documented and men were prosecuted. The conversations in the loft shift between dry humor and gravity, and each woman argues from her own age, temperament, and experience. The confined setting keeps attention on what the women say and what they are prepared to do.
