Women Talking

Eight Mennonite women gather in a hay loft one evening to have a covert gathering. These ladies, along with over a hundred other females in their colony, have endured nightly abuses at the hands of demons who are sent to exact revenge on them for their transgressions for the previous two years. The ladies are resolved to shield their girls and themselves from violence now that they know they were, in reality, drugged and assaulted by a gang of men from their own community.

These women have very little time to decide whether to stay in the only world they have ever known or to dare to escape while the men of the colony are off in the city trying to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home. All of these women are illiterate, have no knowledge of the outside world, and cannot even speak the language of the country in which they live.

Toews's brilliant book, which is based on true events and is narrated via the "minutes" of an all-female symposium, use sardonic, politically charged humour to tell the story of women asserting their own autonomy.