Women Talking - Miriam Toews - 2019
By: Miriam Toews
Narrated by: Matthew Edison
Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 04-02-19
Categories: Literature & Fiction, Amish & Mennonite, Women's Fiction
Language: English
Publisher: Recorded Books
Format: mp3 64/48 mono
A transformative and necessary work - as completely unexpected as it is inspired - by the award-winning author of the best-selling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.
Based on actual events that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community where more than 100 girls and women were drugged unconscious and assaulted in the night by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were "ghosts" or "demons", Miriam Toews' bold and affecting novel Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.
The novel takes place over 48 hours as eight women gather in secret in a neighbor's barn while the men are in a nearby town posting bail for the attackers. They have come together to debate, on behalf of all the women and children in the community, whether to stay or leave before the men return. Taking minutes is the one man trusted and invited by the women to witness the conversation - a former outcast whose own surprising story is revealed as the women speak.
By turns poignant, witty, acerbic, bitter, tender, devastating, and heartbreaking, the voices in this extraordinary novel are unforgettable. Toews has chosen to focus the novel tightly on a particular time and place, and yet it contains within its 48 hours and setting inside a hayloft an entire vast universe of thinking and feeling about the experience of women (and therefore men, too) in our contemporary world. In a word: astonishing.
©2018 Miriam Toews (P)2018 Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
Critic Reviews
“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 of Fates and Furies and Florida)
“Miriam Toews’s Women Talking is a flawless, ferocious work of art . . . [An] illuminating quest to comprehend the most vital contours of the human experience: what is agency, what is meaning, what is justice, what is love. This is the kind of novel that changes you. Get ready.” (Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel)
“I am in awe of this novel. In Toews’s brilliant design, eight women in a Mennonite hayloft tell a story that is terrifying, joyful, gruesome, and magnetic. What a reckoning - and what a gift.” (Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks)
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