Women Talking

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.

This discussion guide was shared and sponsored in partnership with Bloomsbury.

Book club questions for Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

Women Talking begins with “A Note on the Novel” which explains that the story is a fictionalized account of real events. What is the difference between reading this novel versus reading a news story or nonfiction book about these events? What questions does Women Talking encourage readers to ask themselves about these events and the environment in which they occur?

The book is told through August Epp’s notes from the women’s meetings. Why does Toews choose Epp to narrate this story? How does his perspective, gender, and personal history affect the vantage from which the story is told?

The women frequently discuss the complexity of continuing to love many of the men in their community despite their fear and they contemplate the circumstances under which the men would be allowed to join them in their new society. In what ways does the novel explore questions about male experiences, perspectives, and culture?

Which of the options would you have taken if you were one of the women? Explain why. Consider the consequences and benefits of your choice. How would you convince the others to join you?

The book examines both sexual and domestic violence. How does the women’s environment and circumstances dictate how they understand, interpret, and, ultimately, deal with violence? How does this intersect with their religious faith and their beliefs about their place in the world?

Discuss the power of language and literacy. How would the women’s lives be changed if they could read? How does their ability to interpret the Bible for themselves change the women’s understanding of their future?

How does this novel engage with mainstream political and social conversations about women and their rights?

Women Talking Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Women Talking discussion questions

“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

“Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019 by Entertainment Weekly * Vulture * BuzzFeed * The Boston Globe * The A.V. Club * Nylon * Medium * The Millions * Huffington Post * The Rumpus * Lit Hub * Publishers Weekly * The Week * AM New York

“Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest . . . She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves.” —The New Yorker

“A feminist manifesto that delicately unwraps the horror, but also bubbles with the love and wry humor that has endeared Toews to her readers . . . Toews’ celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, Women Talking . . . Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews’s brand of seditious wit.” —The New York Times

“Astonishing . . . Toews, who has written often about her own Mennonite history, has told a riveting story that is both intensely specific and painfully resonant in the wider world. Women Talking is essential, elemental.” —USA Today

“Lean, bristling . . . a remarkably layered and gripping story. . . The book's confined setting and its tight timeframe combine to superb dramatic effect.” —Wall Street Journal

“Astonishing . . . a work of deep moral intelligence, a master class in ethics beautifully dressed as a novel. . . . The intelligence on display in Women Talking is as ferocious as it is warm.” —NPR.org

“[A] sharp blade of a novel . . . Toews’ knowing wit and grasp of dire subjects align her with Margaret Atwood, while her novel's slicing concision and nearly Socratic dialogue has the impact of a courtroom drama or a Greek tragedy. . . . ‘Women talking’ has always been potentially revolutionary. Women are now speaking out about sexual assault and the code of shamed silence in its wake to an unprecedented degree, yet such agonized disclosures continue to be dismissed as the products of 'female imagination,' a contemporary variation on ‘hysteria.’ Toews’s clarifying novel will help further dismantle the toxic habits of sexism.” —Booklist, starred review

“Miriam Toews’s Women Talking is a flawless, ferocious work of art. This is the kind of novel that changes you. Get ready.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

“An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture . . . riveting and revelatory . . . Stunningly original and altogether arresting.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Terrifying and profound.” —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“Powerful . . . Through Epp, Toews has found a way to add lightness and humor to the deeply upsetting and terrifying narrative while weaving in Epp’s own distressing backstory . . . through him readers are able to see how carefully and intentionally the women think through their life-changing decision-critically discussing their roles in society, their love for their families and religion, and their hopes and desires for the future. This is an inspiring and unforgettable novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Women Talking is an astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. 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

“This chilling novel, leavened with notes of humor, is based on actual attacks on women in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Terrifying, joyful, gruesome, and magnetic. What a reckoning-and what a gift.” —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

“This is fiction as deliberation, and yet it feels packed with drama. It also feels infused with a deeply sympathetic understanding of the way women talk. . . . [Toews] draws us into the lives of obscure people and makes their survival feel as crucial and precarious as our own.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Women Talking crackles with the energy of consciousness on every page. Its attention is tender and funny, its characters utterly distinct and alive.” —Leslie Jamison, Bookforum