Miriam Toews

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019 BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * VULTURE * BUZZFEED * BOSTON GLOBE * AV CLUB's * NYLON * MEDIUM * THE MILLIONS * HUFFINGTON POST * THE RUMPUS * LIT HUB * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * THE WEEK * AM New York “This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.” --Margaret Atwood, on Twitter 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? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Women Talking

Steffi Colberg

And perhaps it doesn‘t take too long before you believe that you really don't exist, she said. Or that your actual corporeal existence is a perversity. 

But is forgiveness that is coerced true forgiveness? asks Ona Friesen. And isn't the lie of pretending to forgive with words but not with one's heart a more grievous sin than to simply not forgive?

A very small amount of hate is a necessary ingredient to life.

When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are. 

Ona protests, quietly, that she doesn't believe that at all. She doesn't believe in authority, period, because authority makes people cruel. Salome interrupts: The people with authority or the people without?

How can something that is always the subject, and is eternal, also be one that is unknowable – at least according to Ona? says Mariche.

But when one loves something deeply it's very difficult to keep it a secret, isn't it? she said.

My list is listing, listless. The origin: liste, from Middle English, meaning desire. Which is also the origin of the word „listen.“

Why does the mention of love, the memory of love, the memory of love lost, the promise of love, the end of love, the absence of love, the burning, burning need for love, need to love, result in so much violence?

The women in the loft have taught me that consciousness is resistance, that faith is action, that time is running out. But can faith also be to return, to stay, to serve?

Women Talking quotes

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