Join us for an Adult Book Discussion on Wednesday, Jan. 31 from 1 to 2 p.m. in the Reading Room in the Timothy C. Hauenstein Reynolds Township Library. The January book selection is Women Talking by Miriam Toews. Copies are available for checkout.

About the Author

Miriam Toews was born and raised in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada, the second daughter of Mennonite parents and a direct descendant of one of Steinbach's first settlers, Klaas R. Reimer, who arrived in Manitoba in 1874 from the Ukraine. Her best-selling novels, which include Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, and A Complicated Kindness, have won numerous literary awards: the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. She is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Toews had a leading role in the feature film, Silent Light, written and directed by Carlos Reygadas, and winner of the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize, an experience that informed her fifth novel, Irma Voth.

Book Summary

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.